New scientist 2 1 2016

NO MORE MENOPAUSE New treatment that will turn back time DARK MICROBES Antibiotic treasure hidden in plain sight BRIGHT LIGHT, BIG PITY The other problem with the Arctic’s thinning ice WEEKLY 2 January 2016

no secrets Why 2016 will make or break the internet

what happens if a black hole turns white?

a) Radio waves blast Earth b) Space-time goes quantum c) A universe is created d) All of the above

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Keep calm How to handle your emotions – and other people’s

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Contents

Volume 229 No 3054 This issue online newscientist.com/issue/3054

News

Leaders

Menopause?

I think I’ll pass

News

5 A New Year’s resolution that would benefit everyone. Should we end the menopause?

Ovary freezing offers drug-free way to take back control

Patrick Mourral/Picturetank

8

On the cover

32

8 No more menopause New treatment turns back time 36 Dark microbes Treasure in plain sight 10 Bright light, big pity Arctic melt’s new problem 20 No secrets Make or break for the web 40 Keep calm Handle your emotions – and other people’s

What happens if a black hole turns white?

Cosmic monsters behaving badly

Technology 20 Four

possible futures of the internet.

Google software assesses student skills

Aperture 26 The red, red fields of Italy

Opinion 28 Stop the bots! Jeff Hecht on what customer care tells us about the machine revolution 28 A big drag Tighter regulation may stub out the switch to vaping, says Marcus Munafò 29 One minute with… Michael Jacobs Paris deal leaves tough work ahead 30 Are you there? Don’t take vegetative states at face value, says Joseph Fins

Cover image Bose Collins

Features

40

Keep calm

Features Mohamad Itani/Millennium Images, UK

How to handle your emotions – and other people’s

6 UPFRONT

New disease strikes. UK’s flood-prevention plan. SpaceX finally lands a rocket. Europe’s Galapagos in trouble 8 THIS WEEK Quantum atoms exist in two places at once.

The genes that help you live to 100. Dead stars help seek dark matter. New human species may rewrite history 10 special report Can polar ecosystems adapt to light changes?

17 IN BRIEF

Quake detector picks up vibrations of war. Midnight feasts hamper memory.

Sharks hunt down a whale

32 What happens if a black hole turns white? (see above left) 36 Dark microbes Antibiotic treasure hidden in plain sight 40 Keep calm (see left)

CultureLab

Coming next week…

Forever with us

Meet the other humans who live inside you

The myth of mummy brain

How pregnancy sharpens a mother’s intellect

44 ET, stay home! Smart provocation will ensure we debate the future vigorously 45 Outlook for 2016 Big theories and sparky ideas should make it a good year for books

Regulars 52 letters A revolution powered by crops 56 Feedback Hacking hairdryers 57 The Last Word Upside drone

2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 3

Tom Joslyn / Alamy Stock Photo

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by Williams Gibbons (Wolverhampton)

Good for our health There’s one resolution you can make that benefits everyone NEW YEAR is traditionally when people make resolutions aimed at improving their health: giving up cigarettes, cutting back booze, renewing the gym membership.

But we’d suggest there are broader resolutions worth making.

We’ve known for decades that our antibiotics are failing. We’ve known for almost as long that it will be tough to find new ones.

We’ve had some surprising successes – last year we learned that a 9th-century Anglo-Saxon remedy kills MRSA (4 April 2015, page 14) – but we must do much more to tackle the problem. There are potentially thousands of new drugs out there, however, and researchers are starting to develop ways to find them (see page 36).

But it is early days, and while we wait, we could resolve to extend the life of extant antibiotics for as long as possible. Last month, the US Food and Drug Administration reported that sales of antibiotics approved for use in livestock rose by 23 per cent between 2009 and 2014. Much of this use, linked to the growth of antibiotic resistance in humans, is not to treat infections but to promote growth.

That practice needs to end: the FDA has suggested the end of this year as a deadline. It’s for governments to set and enforce restrictions on such activity, but as citizens we can make our support known. Perhaps it is time we demanded that meat should be labelled as responsibly produced.

Changing the change SHOULD we get rid of the menopause? Experience with women who have received frozen ovaries for medical reasons make this a real possibility – one that some are keen to take up (page 8).

Many women might jump at the chance. A 2005 survey found that 63 per cent of European women had severe symptoms from the menopause; 84 per cent said these should be treated.

Many were reluctant to use hormone replacement therapy, seeing it as risky and intrusive.

Restoring a woman’s hormonal profile by implanting her own tissue might seem a better option.

Assuming the new technique proves safe and effective, it still raises questions. The flip side of delayed menopause is prolonged fertility. But there is ample precedent for that. In 1966, when

But we could also think about our own use. According to the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, almost a quarter of prescriptions for antibiotics won’t benefit those issued them. Why? Nine out of 10 doctors say they feel pressured to prescribe antibiotics; 97 per cent of patients who ask get them.

NICE is working on ways to change this perception of antibiotics as panacea. And sites like openprescribing.net, which makes usage patterns visible, can help. But we can help, too, by asking doctors whether we really do need antibiotics, and by resisting the temptation to demand them.

That’s a resolution worth keeping – for all our health. n

the average age for a women to have her first child was 24, the idea of a 40-year-old new mum would have caused consternation.

Now it is widely accepted.

Menopause is a natural part of a woman’s life cycle. There is much we still don’t know about its role and effects. But we needn’t see it as an inviolable rite of passage.

Delaying it until the time feels right could give women back a sense of control – at a time when their bodies can seem hell-bent on taking it from them. n 2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 5

Lindsey Parnaby/Anadolu Agency/Getty

Upfront

UK flood plan needed PADDLE, anyone? After the damage

lower floors of buildings prone

wreaked over the past fortnight in northern England by storms Eva and Frank, flood supremos in the UK have ordered an overhaul of the way the country handles flooding.

“We will need to have a complete rethink. We will need to move from not just providing better defences, but also looking at increasing resilience,” said David Rooke, deputy chief executive of the Environment Agency earlier this week.

The agency is mulling updating

to flooding, and providing special plugs for toilet basins so they don’t overflow, deluging homes in sewage.

The rethink will be outlined in the National Flood Resilience Review, announced by environment secretary Elizabeth Truss two weeks before storms Eva and Frank hit. She said the review would update “worst-casescenario” planning, assess future impacts of climate change and evaluate the scale of risks to critical infrastructure, such as electricity

flood defences such as barriers and walls and making cities and homes better able to cope with more rainfall and flooding, seen as inevitable because of global warming.

Ideas could include flood-proofing by eliminating carpeting from the

substations, to avoid loss of power to flooded homes.

“We need a change in mindset,” says Hannah Cloke at the University of Reading, UK. “If we can’t protect ourselves from floodwaters, we need to learn to live with them.”

–Not your average commute–

Zika on the loose NEW year, new threat. A virus suspected of triggering fetal brain damage is likely to spread further in 2016.

Zika virus was discovered in the Zika forest in Uganda in 1947. For the next 50 years, the mosquito-borne virus caused small, sporadic outbreaks in parts of Africa and South-East Asia.

Since 2013, there have been outbreaks on many Pacific islands – on the island of Yap, it infected 75 per cent of the population. In May last year,

“Detecting the virus in new areas is important, as is the surveillance of serious cases or complications” it made landfall in Brazil and has since spread to nine more countries, as far north as Mexico.

Zika has spread so fast that health agencies are ramping up resources to track and contain it.

“Detecting circulation of the virus in new geographic areas is most important, to strengthen the responses of health services and 6 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

step up surveillance for serious cases or complications,” says Sylvain Aldighieri of the Pan American Health Organization and World Health Organization’s regional office for the Americas.

As well as learning more about the virus and the illness it causes, anti-zika programmes for 2016 include measures to reduce mosquito breeding sites and increase the capacity of labs to detect the virus quickly.

There have been a few cases in Europe and the US when visitors to infected countries have returned with the virus.

“Clinicians need to be aware that this virus is rampant in South America, so it should be in their minds when they see possible cases,” says Abraham Goorhuis of the Center for Tropical and Travel Medicine at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, who diagnosed three people returning from Suriname in December.

Although the virus is seldom lethal in adults, it may cause fetal brain damage. In Brazil and French Polynesia, brain defects increased dramatically wherever the virus emerged.

Blood ban lifted BLOOD donation guidelines in the US are becoming more inclusive.

The US Food and Drug Administration now recommends that gay and bisexual men should be permitted to donate blood – provided they haven’t had sex in over a year. Although clinics can still decide whether or not to follow the recommendations, the change brings the FDA into line with regulatory bodies in the UK and Australia.

Men who have sex with men

have been “indefinitely deferred” from donating blood in the US since 1983. The controversial policy was brought in as a response to the risk of HIV transmission via transfusions.

The FDA cited recent epidemiological data as the motivation for the change.

The news received mixed reactions from the gay community. In a public statement, the National Gay Blood Drive, an activist group, argued that the new policy is still discriminatory and lacks a scientific basis.

Concrete threatens unique lake SOME call it Europe’s Galapagos.

of the University of Giessen in

Lake Ohrid is home to more than 350 species found nowhere else. It is also Europe’s oldest lake, having survived for more than a million years.

But the lake’s 75-hectare marsh – a critical ecosystem – is set to be concreted over to make space for apartments and a marina in the lakeside town of Ohrid in Macedonia.

“These development plans will irreversibly destroy this crucial ecosystem,” says Christian Albrecht

Germany. “I am seriously concerned about the future of its endemic species.”

The majority of the lake’s fish and snails are found only in this lake, as are many of its sponges and worms.

In a letter sent to the Macedonian president in October, Daniel Jablonski of the University of Bratislava in Slovakia called the plan “totally unacceptable”. So far, the city authorities haven’t responded.

For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news

“WELCOME back, baby!” That’s how SpaceX founder Elon Musk celebrated the landing of its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 21 December. The rocket delivered 11 satellites into orbit before landing upright for the first time.

STR/AFP/Getty

First rocket landing

60 Seconds

Methane megaleak A major leak from a gas well in California has forced 2200 people to evacuate their homes, and threatens thousands more. The leak has emitted the CO2-equivalent of 7 million cars every day since starting in October, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

SoCalGas, which owns the well, has found the leak’s source, but says it won’t be plugged until March.

“It’s been a very celebratory atmosphere here at SpaceX. I think people are really overjoyed”

Icy moon lander

Danita Delimont / Alamy Stock Photo

It was SpaceX’s first launch since 28 June, when a Falcon 9 delivering cargo to the International Space Station Fences kill wildlife exploded shortly after launch, and was its third landing attempt. FENCES put up to stop refugees Since then, design changes have crossing European borders are killing wild animals. Deer are improved the stage separation suffering for days on end after system and allowed the upper becoming entangled in barbedstage to hold more propellant. wire barriers erected by Slovenia SpaceX has been racing Blue along the border with Croatia.

Origin, founded by Amazon CEO The fences are also obstructing Jeff Bezos, to develop reusable the annual migration of deer from rockets. Blue Origin returned a high to low altitudes, as well as the rocket to Earth from the edge of lynx and wolves that follow them – space on 23 November. However, whose numbers are already low.

Blue Origin didn’t put its payload “Lynx use habitats in both into orbit.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 was carrying “Lynx use habitats in both satellites for communications countries and cross the company Orbcomm and plans border daily to search for crewed missions for 2017. food and partners” “It’s been a very celebratory atmosphere here at SpaceX. I think people are really overjoyed,” countries and cross the border daily to search for food and Musk told a media conference. partners,” says Magda Sindicic at the University of Zagreb, Croatia.

The fence puts the lynx – and wolf packs shared between Croatia and Slovenia – at a higher risk of inbreeding. “Now they’re partitioned, with half their range suddenly out of reach,” says Djuro Huber also at the University of Zagreb. “Gene flow will become much more of a problem.”

Bears, too, could be affected if their territories suddenly contract, warns Huber. There are some 3000 bears in the Balkans, he says. But the habitat is being –Popular with developers– fragmented by border fences in

–Perfect for snaring–

Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary and Slovenia.

The solution? The fences must go, says Huber. This call has been echoed by the IUCN and WWF, as well as Croatia’s foreign minister, who has written to the European Commission saying the border fence “presents an insurmountable obstacle to the migration of wild native species”.

Tornado cluster WEIRD, deadly weather is pounding the US. A cluster of tornadoes have swept through northern Texas and the Midwest in the past week, bringing snow, floods and heavy winds. At least 43 people have died.

While such large tornado activity is unseasonal, it isn’t without precedent. In the past, El Niño years have spawned large storm systems late in the year – in 1957 and 1982, for example. And this year’s El Niño is the strongest ever recorded.

A strong polar vortex probably compounded the situation, keeping the cold air from the east out, says Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist at the University of Georgia in Athens. “The unusually warm December primes the atmosphere for a significant contrast, and thus the battleground that we’ve seen play out,” he says.

The US government has told NASA to visit Europa in 2022. The latest budget set aside $175 million for a planned fly-by of Jupiter’s glacier moon, but it added a twist: NASA is required to land on the moon, not just fly past. Europa is a promising target in the search for extraterrestrial life, thanks to its liquid water ocean.

No lion trophies here The US Fish and Wildlife Service decided in December to classify African lions as either “endangered” or “threatened”. The move closes the US market to all trade in lion parts and trophies, says Adam Roberts of the Born Free Foundation.

Russian space rebrand Roscosmos is dead, long live Roscosmos. Russia’s space agency was reborn this week. Currently the only way for astronauts to reach the International Space Station, Roscosmos will become a stateowned corporation. It will aim to compete with companies like SpaceX, which aim to start carrying humans to space in 2017.

Super-gonorrhoea rises Drug-resistant gonorrhoea could become untreatable, England’s chief medical officer Sally Davies has warned. A drug-resistant strain of the disease was detected in Leeds last year, and this week Davies urged doctors to use a combination of antibiotics to keep the bacteria in check. Using just one drug makes it easier for resistance to evolve.

2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 7

Menopause?

I think I’ll pass

PATRICK MOURRAL/PICTURETANK

THIS WEEK

You don’t need drugs to control the disruptive symptoms of menopause Clare Wilson

IT COULD be as revolutionary as the pill. Freezing an ovary and having thin slices of it periodically put back later in life looks set to offer women a way to delay or reverse menopause.

This should avoid symptoms without the need for hormone replacement therapy – something many women are reluctant to take because of its link with breast cancer.

“ Having a beautiful young ovary in the freezer is a real gift. Having options is so liberating” The first steps have already been taken. The technique has restored fertility in women who have undergone medical treatment that triggers premature menopause (see “Changing times”, below right). Some of these women say they want to continue having the ovary grafts to delay their natural menopause, once they reach that age. At least one fertility clinic, in the US, is offering ovary freezing to women who plan to use it for both fertility and menopause reasons.

Menopause happens because of falling levels of sex hormones such as oestrogen, which are normally produced by eggs as they ripen in the ovaries.

Because women are born with all the eggs they are ever going to produce, and hundreds die with each menstrual cycle, they eventually run out of eggs that can pump out hormones.

8 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

But freezing one ovary while the eggs are still young and plentiful offers a way to stop the clock. A paper published last month in the journal Human Reproduction suggests that reimplanted 1-millimetre slices can function for around two years (doi.org/982). As one ovary generates about 20 slices, a woman could in theory delay her menopause for decades by having them put back one at a time.

The data come from 41 women treated at several Danish fertility clinics. All had been through chemotherapy and had their ovaries frozen in case they wanted children. However, by the time they had recovered from chemo, a few no longer wanted children and had the grafts put back in solely to reverse their chemo-induced menopause, says Claus Andersen at Copenhagen University Hospital, who was involved in the work.

Two of the women have so far had two or three grafts, restoring a normal menstrual cycle for more than 10 years.

Although the women have yet to reach the age of natural menopause – the oldest is 44 – the

results provide evidence that the approach could work in older women who want to delay their menopause, says Andersen.

“We have shown that it works for 10 years and I would not be surprised if it lasts 30,” says Andersen, who argues for ovarian grafts to be offered as a treatment for menopause. “Because of the cancer patients you could argue this is already happening.”

As well as carrying out the procedure for medical reasons,

CHANGING TIMES Women normally go through the menopause between the ages of 48 and 55, with 1 per cent experiencing it before 40.

Its effects vary from woman to woman but can range from inconvenient to life-disrupting.

These may include hot flushes and night sweats, loss of libido, sleep

problems and mood swings. These usually last for about four years.

In November, the UK’s official health advice body, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), published its first guidelines on menopause. It recommends HRT for hot flushes, night sweats and low mood.

Sherman Silber, head of the Infertility Center of St Louis in Missouri, has removed an ovary from 15 healthy women who want to delay having children, for example, for career reasons.

Some in this group also plan to use their stored tissue to delay their menopause past the normal time.

“It seems like the most brilliant solution,“ says Jenny RemingtonHobbs, a doctor who had an ovary frozen before having treatment for multiple sclerosis. This triggered premature menopause but she didn’t want to go on HRT. “I don’t like the idea of being on medication unless I needed to be.

This way I don’t have to experience bone loss [associated with menopause].”

Although the flip side of delaying menopause is prolonging fertility, there are ways around this. While women who want a child can have the ovarian slice grafted onto their

In this section n Can polar ecosystems adapt to light changes?, page 10 n The genes that help you live to 100, page 12 n Four possible futures of the internet, page 20

Lasers kick ball of atoms into two places at once TRY to imagine a tiny ball sitting on one fingertip yet also on your shoulder at the same instant. Are you struggling? Most of us can’t conceive of an object being in two places at once – yet physicists have just demonstrated the effect over a distance of half a metre, smashing previous records.

It’s an example of superposition, the idea that an object can exist in two quantum states at the same time. This persists until it is observed, causing a property called its wave function to collapse into one state or the other. The same principle allows Schrödinger’s cat to be both dead and alive inside a box until you open the lid.

We often think of quantum mechanics as applying only to

SALLY MUNDY/PLAINPICTURE

“With HRT you have the chance to modulate the dose, and you don’t need an operation.”

But HRT has fallen out of favour in recent years since trials suggested it raises a woman’s risk of breast cancer. Oestrogen is known to promote breast tumour growth and women who have a naturally later menopause – so are exposed to oestrogen for longer – do have a slightly higher risk of this cancer. But oestrogen’s benefits to bones and the heart mean later menopause prolongs life overall.

Andersen predicts ovary grafts will mimic the effects of a naturally late menopause more closely than HRT does, as they supply a woman’s own hormones.

But Pasquale Patrizio of Yale Fertility Center says young ovarian tissue reimplanted into a 50-year-old might start acting like older tissue because of its environment. “I’m not against this, but we do need more animal research,” he says.

Some people might go ahead –Free to choose – anyway, as awareness grows thanks to the rising numbers remaining ovary, those who don’t of women who have an ovary could have the tissue inserted frozen for medical reasons. under the skin of their arm.

“Some women will find this “A woman could come back an attractive option, so it should whenever she stopped be a matter of choice,” says menstruating and have a new Hamish Wallace of the chip inserted,” says Andersen.

University of Edinburgh, UK. It may even be possible to do Remington-Hobbs found her this without continuing to have induced menopause the worst periods – endometrial ablation aspect of her treatments. “That can be used to remove the lining was the thing that upset me the of the womb. most,” she says. “The sweating was really challenging.”

She had some of her ovary Stop the clock slices reimplanted in 2012 and While Silbert and Andersen they restored her menstrual cycle. are keen to see the procedure She now has a 1-year-old daughter, more widely adopted, the who was unplanned but very technique has its critics. Delaying welcome. If the ovary slices stop menopause this way would have working and her menopause disadvantages compared with returns, she has not yet decided HRT, where synthetic oestrogen whether she will have further is taken in tablet or patch form, grafts but she is grateful for the says Michael von Wolff, of option. “Having a beautiful young FertiProtekt, a network of 100 ovary in the freezer is a real gift,” European clinics offering ovary she says. “The truth is that having freezing for medical reasons. options is just so liberating.” n

quantum state. They shot this cloud, just a few millimetres across, up a 10-metre-high chamber using lasers, which also gradually push the atoms into two separate states.

By the time the BEC reaches the top of the chamber, its wave function is a 50-50 mixture of those states, representing positions 54 centimetres apart. It stays in this superposition for about a second, then falls back down.

“ We’re wondering if there is some regime where superpositions turn into ordinary states of matter” At the bottom, the lasers turn the two states back into one, and this reveals that the atoms appear to arrive from two different heights, confirming that

subatomic particles, but there is nothing in the theory that limits its range. That’s why experiments try to probe the transition between the quantum and everyday realms. “We’re all wondering whether there is some

the BEC was indeed in a superposition at the top of the chamber (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature16155).

Previous experiments demonstrated superposition over much smaller distances and times –

regime where superpositions turn into classical states of matter,” says Mark Kasevich of Stanford University in California.

To find out, Kasevich and his colleagues created a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) – a cloud of 10,000 rubidium atoms, all in the same

the old record was just under a centimetre for a quarter of a second.

Kasevich’s work pushes it into human scales. “Our work really is definitive for large separations,” he says.

“Nobody else has done that.”

Pulling it off involved cooling the chamber to a fraction above absolute zero, and minutely adjusting the BEC’s trajectory to account for Earth’s rotation during the experiment.

“They’ve explored the unknown,” says Klaus Hornberger of the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

But it may be less of a breakthrough than it seems. In 2013, Hornberger helped devise a “weirdness scale” that scores experiments according to how far they show quantum effects extending into the everyday world.

Kasevich’s work extends the distance scale but compromises in other ways,

so scores about the same as previous attempts, says Hornberger. That means a true Schrödinger’s cat is still –On reality’s scent– far from being realised. Jacob Aron n 2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 9

This week climate change

Arctic seas are lighting up As the world warms, a previously overlooked effect of melting polar ice is starting to kick in. Olive Heffernan reports AND then there was light. As ice disappears from the Arctic, the waters below are changing – in ways that until now have mostly been overlooked. Light, once blocked by thick ice, is now penetrating deeper than ever before – and it will have a huge impact on Arctic ecosystems.

The effect of warming on ice and sea level have been studied extensively. Until now, the effect of light on the Arctic had not been explored. But its effect is likely to be significant on creatures adapted to unique temperature and light conditions around the poles. “We tend to think of climate warming as something related to

Administration (NOAA).

The extent of summer ice was the lowest recorded since it was first measured in 1979: its area has declined by 40 per cent in 35 years and its volume by a whopping 70 per cent. It could all but disappear in summer by mid-century. “We appear to be destined at this point for a seasonally ice-free Arctic,” says Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado.

temperature, but what is truly unique to polar regions is the light,” says Jørgen Berge of the Arctic University of Norway.

“The change in light will be an abrupt and critically important impact of climate change near the poles, but has been relatively overlooked compared to changes in temperature and pH,” says Graeme Clark at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Arctic waters are home to complex ecosystems that evolved in the dim light over millions of years. The ice is often at least a metre thick, and in winter also has extensive snow cover.

Now those conditions are changing rapidly. The average annual air temperature was higher in 2015 than at any time since 1900, when records began, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric 10 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

Franco Banfi/naturepl.com

“ There is no doubt that changed light levels will affect predation and make the Arctic a riskier place”

Clark and his colleagues were the first to sound the alarm about the impact of extra light on polar oceans, in 2013. Now a team led by Øystein Varpe, an ecologist at the University Centre in Svalbard, Norway, has modelled how light levels will change over the coming decades. The group found that the reduction in snow cover and increased melting will cause a dramatic increase in light exposure by mid-century,

possibly as early as 2025, assuming carbon emissions continue rising.

Most of the increase in ice loss happens in summer, when the sun is at its maximum intensity.

“It’s as though the lid has been removed from the sea surface, just when the lights are on full blast,” Varpe says.

This means marine ecosystems are finding themselves in a new, sunshine-filled setting. One of the main things it will do is boost plant life. “Even a small change in summer sea ice can have a massive impact on biodiversity,” says Varpe.

For so-called primary producers – the organisms that use light to convert simple molecules into food – more

sunshine is a good thing. At high latitudes, light is in short supply for much of the year and so a little bit extra, especially early on in spring, can have big knock-on effects.

Plankton boost Spring melting of ice now happens earlier in the Arctic: in 2015 it was a full 15 days earlier than the long-term average, according to NOAA. So algae and other photosynthesising phytoplankton appear sooner and stay around for longer.

The organisms that feed on those plankton should in theory benefit from this, but they are adapted to a short bloom of phytoplankton that coincides

with the arrival of their young.

So they may not be able to take advantage of extra bounty.

The type of food available could also change. Sea ice normally has forests of algae clinging to its underside. If it breaks up, however, algae floating in the water will flourish instead. The exact timing and type of ice loss determines which of these communities thrives at any one time.

Algae won’t have it all their own way, though. In deeper waters, other factors may limit their growth, says biologist Paul Wassmann, also at the Arctic University of Norway. He and his colleagues have studied how fresh water from melting sea ice will affect the ocean. Fresh water does not mix easily with saltwater, so could form a layer on the surface, making the ocean more stratified.

This could prevent nutrient-rich deeper water from reaching the surface, stifling productivity. “The future Arctic Ocean will be a blue ocean,” says Wassmann, “not a green ocean.”

Shallow waters may be less constrained by stratification.

Recent experiments in Antarctica suggest that as the ice retreats from shallow waters, algae displace more diverse invertebrate communities of polychaete worms, sponges, bryozoans and tunicates.

This is already happening in more southern parts of the Arctic. In Svalbard, warming and sea ice retreat has led to between five and eight times as much

“ We’re looking at a tipping point in polar ecosystems, where communities change as sea ice retreats” algal cover during the period 1980 to 2010, especially brown algae covering the rocky seabed.

Some think this means that relatively small changes in light conditions could lead to rapid and extensive changes to ecological –Warmer and brighter– communities. “We’re looking at

FLIP NICKLIN / MINDEN PICTURES

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

SWIMMIN’ IN THE MOONLIGHT The polar night – when the sun dips below the horizon for several months – was once assumed to be a time when Arctic species lay dormant or moved to places with more light.

In fact, it is a world of activity, where animals show all their normal behaviours. Jørgen Berge of the Arctic University of Norway and

that Arctic animals can respond to light levels undetectable by human eyes, facilitating behaviours such as foraging in faint moonlight (Progress in Oceanography, doi.org/97f).

In the Arctic, the sea ice is at its lowest extent in September, which coincides with the onset of the polar night. As ice cover dwindles, more

his colleagues monitored activity over three winters in Svalbard, and discovered scallops growing, seabirds foraging and a variety of shallow-water scavengers, such as crabs, feeding. In some habitats,

light will penetrate the water and this will affect nocturnal activity, says Berge. For example, the predatory Arctic krill, Thysanoessa inermis, can hunt using ambient light from the moon as far as 30 metres down,

there was greater diversity and more juveniles around than in the summer (Current Biology, doi.org/7xd).

In a separate study, Berge found

Berge and his colleagues have found.

“These zooplankton could become more effective predators as the light changes,” he says.

the potential for a light-induced tipping point in polar ecosystems, where communities change as the sea ice retreats,” says Clark.

Eventually, invertebrate communities will become restricted to small, dark refugia as algae take over, he says.

These changes may have knock-on effects up the food web, on fish, birds and large mammals such as whales and sea lions. Predatory species in particular could benefit from the new light regime by being able to see their prey more easily, for longer and in more areas than before, Varpe and Clark suggest.

“There is no doubt that a changed

light climate in the Arctic will affect visual predation,” says Berge. For example, commercially important fish such as herring, capelin and mackerel, which need good light in which to hunt prey, might expand their ranges northward. “For some, the Arctic is set to become a riskier place,” says Varpe.

Although a brighter Arctic Ocean might attract more fish, that doesn’t mean that they would survive well there, says Ken Drinkwater, a biological oceangrapher based in Bergen, Norway. “Not all species would do well in such cold waters,” he says. n 2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 11

This week

Genes that help you live to 100 FANCY living for a century?

Your luck may be in if you carry protective variants of four newly discovered genes. One gene determines blood group, another helps regulate cellular life cycles, while the third is involved in how the immune system recognises the body’s own cells. The fourth has been shown to extend lifespan in fruit flies.

Uncovered by searching the genomes of centenarians, the genes join APOE, which is known to influence Alzheimer’s risk, as the bits of our genome most clearly associated with lifespan.

They are tantalising clues to uncovering the mystery of why we age, and could help us prevent age-related diseases.

Studies of identical twins suggest that genetic make-up plays a big part in longevity. It is common for siblings to live very long lives. “Those sorts of things argue persuasively that about 20 per cent of lifespan is genetic, possibly more for living to be extremely old,” says Stuart Kim at Stanford University in Calfornia, whose team carried

Dead stars may salvage dark matter hunt WATCHING the death spirals of stars may succeed where searches deep underground have failed.

Last month, the Large Underground Xenon experiment reported its latest findings: nothing. Located about 1.5 kilometres below ground in the Black Hills of South Dakota, LUX is seeking so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) – the most favoured 12 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

out the latest research.

But which genes are responsible? Several studies have looked for variations that are more or less common in longlived people, but until now, only APOE turned up consistently.

For example, in 2014, Kim

candidate for the dark matter that cosmologists think makes up most of the universe’s mass.

Some of the most precisely studied gravitational systems known are binary pulsars. They contain a

because it is losing energy by emitting gravitational waves. Now, Pani has shown that dark matter adds friction

It is the most sensitive detector of its type. But if dark matter has properties that are ever so slightly different from what LUX and similar experiments are designed to look for, they will not see it.

So Paolo Pani at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, sought to probe dark matter in ways that did not depend on guessing its properties.

“There is something we surely know about dark matter, which is that it interacts gravitationally,” says Pani.

pulsar – a dense, dead star emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation and rotating like a lighthouse beacon – in orbit around another dense, compact object, such as a black hole or neutron star.

The pulsar tends to spiral inwards over time, and this is thought to be

to the system, making the pulsar spiral in even faster in most cases (arxiv.org/abs/1512.01236).

Future telescopes could pick up this tiny effect. That would, in turn, let us determine the density of dark matter throughout the galaxy and tell us something about its nature. For instance, the rate of the pulsar’s orbital decay could depend on whether dark matter particles can interact with and annihilate each other. Anil Ananthaswamy n

Juan Carlos Ulate / Reuters

Sam Wong

published a study comparing the genomes of 17 people aged 110 and over with those of the general population. The study included a 116-year-old woman who was the world’s oldest living person at the time. He hoped these supercentenarians might share a rare gene variant that would explain their tenacity but nothing turned up, and the media announced the death of the “longevity gene”.

This time Kim expanded his search to include 800 people over

100 and about 5000 over 90 – but narrowed the focus to genes known to influence age-related diseases.

His idea was that this would indicate common mechanisms associated with ageing.

He was right. Of the four new genes and APOE that showed up in the search, each has a variant that seems to reduce or increase a person’s chances of reaching 100. The variations are common in the general population, but centenarians seem to have fewer “bad” variants.

“It’s the first time someone has shown that particular disease [variants] are depleted in centenarian populations,” says Timothy Cash of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid. “It points to important processes that are impaired in ageing populations.”

Predicting how long someone will live based on their genes remains a distant dream, however. “I don’t think we’ll ever have concrete genetic determinants that will allow us to say this person is going to live to be 100-odd,” says Cash.

But Kim is convinced that longevity is strongly influenced by genetics, and believes that the search will lead to answers. “I’m optimistic that in our lifetime or our children’s lifetime, there are going to be amazing scientific advances that could change how –Holding back the years– we think about longevity.” n

“ There is something we surely know about dark matter, which is that it interacts gravitationally”

This week

Michael Slezak

WE MAY have lived alongside an archaic human species just 10,500 years ago in China. Controversial bone discoveries suggest we even interbred with and cannibalised these mystery hominins.

Some think the findings could overturn our understanding of what it means to be human.

“If true, this would be rather spectacular and it would make the finds of truly global importance,” says Michael Petraglia at the

“ This suggests we were mating with an archaic human species, and using hybrid bones as tools” University of Oxford, who wasn’t involved in the discoveries.

One of the most exciting finds is a hominin femur found in Muladong cave in south-west China, alongside other human and animal bones. It shows evidence of having been burned in a fire that was used for cooking other meat, and has marks consistent with it being butchered.

It has also been broken in a way that is used to access bone marrow. Unusually, it has been painted with a red clay called ochre, associated with burial rituals (PLoS One, doi.org/97c).

Things got more interesting when the team tried to identify the bone. “Our work shows clearly that the femur resembles archaic humans,” says Darren Curnoe of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who led the team behind the discoveries. Yet the sediment the bone was found in dates to just 14,000 years ago.

This would make it the most recent human species to go extinct.

The shaft of the bone is very narrow and it has a thin outer 14 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

layer. There is also a notch where muscle would have joined the bone that is much larger than in anatomically modern humans, and it faces more towards the back of the bone. “These features suggest it walked differently,” says Curnoe. And judging by the bone’s size, he estimates an adult would have weighed 50 kilograms – much smaller than other known Ice Age humans.

“When you put all the evidence together the femur comes out quite clearly resembling the early members of Homo,” says Curnoe.

This includes the earliest human species, Homo habilis and Homo erectus, which lived some 2 million years ago.

If confirmed, says Petraglia, this would change our understanding of human evolution.

Besides Homo floresiensis, also known as “the Hobbit”, which was confined to an Indonesian island up to around 18,000 years ago, the most recent archaic humans were thought to be the Denisovans and Neanderthals, which became extinct soon after we came through their lands

The Asian melting pot Bones found in two caves in China suggest our ancestors lived alongside an archaic species of human just 10,500 years ago

MONGOLIA Beijing

CHINA LONGLIN

INDIA

MALUDONG

Hong Kong

mike dunn/electric pictures

New human species may rewrite history

–Is this the youngest human hybrid?–

some 40,000 years ago.

“This turns that on its head,” says Curnoe. “Its young age shows that remarkably primitivelooking humans must have shared the landscape with very modernlooking people at a time when China’s earliest farming cultures were beginning to flourish.”

But some in the field have doubts that such a young bone can be from something so archaic.

“It is not an archaic human,” says Erik Trinkaus at Washington University in St Louis. He thinks the differences in the bone are a result of natural variation within a population, not a new species.

Henry McHenry at the University of California, Davis, is more ambivalent. He says the femur looks very odd, but that it does seem to have similarities to very archaic humans.

Supporting evidence comes from Longlin cave, a few hundred kilometres north (see map, left), where a stash of human bones, including an almost complete skull, were found – some in 1979.

Curnoe and Ji Xueping at the

Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in China reanalysed these bones and dug up more, describing them in 2012.

Their analysis suggests the bones belong to a hybrid of our species and something more archaic – probably the hominin that once walked on the now-painted femur.

They have preliminarily dated the hybrid to just 10,500 years ago.

One of the bones had been cut and had holes dug near its top, suggesting it was used as a vessel for carrying and drinking liquid.

What all this hints at, Curnoe and colleagues say, is that Homo sapiens was mating with an archaic human species, possibly eating them, and using the hybrid offspring bones as tools. But to back up these claims, we will need DNA evidence, says Petraglia.

“Ultimately, what we’d like is DNA evidence,” agrees Curnoe, “But so far we’ve had no luck.” The burning of many of the bones and the tropical climate have degraded the DNA. He says technology has improved, though, and they will keep trying. n

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in Brief A snapshot of life 3.2 billion years ago

Sharks seen attacking a whale calf for the first time YOU’RE never big enough to be safe. A humpback whale calf some 4 metres long endured a harrowing ordeal,

We have never seen such an attack before, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen, says Matt Dicken at the KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board in South Africa, whose team witnessed the incident. “It’s still probably quite rare, but they are happening,” he says. The East African humpback whale population is growing, so we might see more such

beset by a group of dusky sharks, each 2 to 3 metres long, off the eastern coast of South Africa. This is the first time a shark has been directly documented attacking a whale.

For several hours, the calf swam in circles, pursued by between 10 and 20 sharks, which usually dine on fish.

The calf was bitten many times, thrashed vigorously at the surface when attacked, and attempted to swim

shark attacks in future, Dicken suggests (Marine and Freshwater Research, doi.org/96p).

Still, sharks are unlikely to pose a regular danger to healthy whale calves. It is possible that this calf was injured or abandoned by its mother, who wasn’t there during the attack. Even though sharks can be highly social and can hunt cooperatively, Dicken thinks that in

away. Then it disappeared, probably drowning from exhaustion. It is unknown whether the sharks ate it.

this case they were probably just aggregating around the calf and attacking it opportunistically.

Squeezing new particles from the LHC NO FRESH particles to usher in the new year. On 15 December, particle physicists at CERN near Geneva crowded into the main lecture hall where the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced in 2012. They’d gathered to hear the first results since the LHC was turned back on for its second run.

Instead of new discoveries, though, early hints of new physics from the end of the LHC’s first run

seemed to have faded away.

Researchers from the CMS and ATLAS experiments presented their initial findings. Both confirmed the standard model of particle physics, showing this run was working as expected.

Before the LHC shut down for upgrades in February 2013, both had weak evidence for a boson much heavier than the Higgs. But now they can’t see the signal. Also

conspicuously absent was the signal from a potential particle nicknamed “the edge”. But there is a glimmer of hope.

Both ATLAS and CMS reported an excess of events producing two photons at around 750 gigaelectronvolts, and the source could be another particle.

The fact that both experiments see a similar signal suggests there might be a discovery on the horizon in 2016, but it could still be a fluke.

SOME don’t like it hot. Early microbes looked for shade when the sun was strong, just like we do.

We think life first emerged on Earth in the Archean aeon or earlier, when the planet was scorched by deadly UV radiation and had no ozone layer to protect it – a bit like Mars is today. So life at the surface would have found survival a challenge.

Now bacteria fossils dating back 3.2 billion years have been found in cavities in tidal sediments in South Africa (Geology, doi. org/96n). This shows that life was possible very close to the surface back then, says Alessandro Airo at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, whose colleague Martin Homann analysed the fossils.

This bodes well for the history of life on Mars. “It could well be that microbes thrived even on the surface of Mars and not necessarily only in deep water or the subsurface,” Airo says.

Seeking life in the seas of Enceladus DOES anything live in the seas of Enceladus? Despite 10 years orbiting Saturn’s icy moon and sampling the material gushing from its plumes, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is far from an answer.

Now two proposed missions hope to search for life more directly.

One, called the Enceladus Life Finder (ELF), would bring more sensitive mass spectrometers than Cassini’s flying through the plumes to detect and identify amino acids, the building blocks of life. Another, dubbed LIFE (Life Investigation For Enceladus), hopes to collect samples from the plumes and return them to Earth.

Both missions await funding.

Cassini, meanwhile, made its last flight through the plumes on 19 December.

2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 17

in Brief

WHETHER it’s a post-party kebab or a midnight fridge raid, we are all guilty of eating when we should be sleeping. As well as ruining our waistlines, a study in mice suggests our brains may suffer too.

Mice are nocturnal and eat throughout the night. To find out what happens when this pattern is disturbed, Dawn Loh and her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, fed one group of mice between 9 pm and 3 am, while another group only had access to food between 9 am and 3 pm. The mice ate this way for two weeks.

Although both groups slept for the same amount of time, the mice that fed during the day had more frequent, shorter bouts of sleep.

Their circadian rhythms were out of sync, which affected levels of proteins including one important for learning and memory. The “misaligned” mice also performed less well on memory tests (eLIFE, doi.org/97j).

The study is the first evidence

D.Hurst/Alamy

that the timing of meals might affect learning and memory. It is too soon to say whether those of us who indulge in late-night eating will suffer the same effects, although Loh thinks her findings might apply to people. Night-shift workers, for example, have been shown to perform less well on cognitive tests.

18 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

Sleeping pill is surprise stroke treatment TIME to wake up. Mice that have had a stroke recover more quickly if given small doses of a sleeping pill than if given a placebo.

A stroke cuts off the blood supply to part of the brain, leading to the death of oxygenstarved tissue. Some tissue repair takes place naturally, but most people never fully recover.

One repair mechanism may be an increase in signalling by the GABA neurotransmitter in parts of the brain that are able to rewire themselves. As the sleeping pill Ambien acts on GABA receptors,

Gary Steinberg of Stanford University School of Medicine and his team wondered whether they could use it to improve recovery.

They induced two types of stroke in mice: one group received one that damaged sensory abilities, the other, one that impaired movement. In both, mice given Ambien – in a lower quantity than required to put them to sleep – recovered the ability to notice a piece of tape stuck to their paw and remove it faster than those given a placebo (Brain, DOI: 10.1093/brain/awv360).

Ambien is the best-known incarnation of the drug zolpidem, which was prescribed 40 million times in the US in 2011. The fact that Ambien is already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) means human studies could start relatively soon, says Steinberg.

The use of Ambien isn’t without controversy: thousands of people have had adverse reactions to it.

But there have also been reports that it can wake people from a minimally conscious state in some rare cases.

Baz Ratner/Reuters

Midnight feasts hamper memory

For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news

Papped: penguin brawl underwater THERE’S no honour between penguin thieves. An underwater fight between three gentoo penguins has been captured on camera, and it has revealed them stealing food from each other.

“This is completely new behaviour, not just for gentoo penguins but for penguins in general,” says co-author Jonathan Handley of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

The penguins were fighting over a squid, which was eventually torn in two (Polar Biology, doi. org/96q). “It is interesting that the interaction was over a squid: a large and difficult-to-capture prey item that is clearly worth fighting for,” says Norman Ratcliffe of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. We already knew that penguins stole pebbles from each other’s nests and have records of seabirds fighting over food above water.

So why do they steal?

“Individuals able to acquire more resources, including both food and nesting material, will be able to provide better parental care for offspring, thus increasing the offspring’s chance to survive until fledging,” Handley says.

Seismic tools discern quakes of war MILITARY history is hidden in the squiggles of a seismogram. During the Iraq war, earthquake-monitoring instruments at Baghdad’s seismic

nearby reported military activity.

There were unique seismic signatures for each type of weapon.

And vibrations from heavy air traffic

observatory also recorded wartime activity including car bombs, weapon rounds and improvised explosives.

Michael Wysession at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues looked at the data for traces of a big event on 10 October 2006, when rounds fired into an ammunition supply point set off a chain of explosions.

They detected not just this “cook-off”, but also evidence of other

were clear enough that they could discern the type and speed of helicopters flying past (Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, DOI: 10.1785/0120140187).

Such detectors could be used to gather military intelligence, says Stephen Arrowsmith at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “It could be useful as a tool to characterise what’s going on in this type of environment.”

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Technology

Four futures of the net There’s a debate raging over the technology that keeps the internet secure.

Jacob Aron sketches four possible futures, and what they mean for you or should we accept that there is some information our governments will never know?

Edward Snowden ignited this debate when he revealed the extent of the US government’s mass surveillance. Privacy advocates were outraged. Tech companies like Apple and Google responded by increasing the levels of encryption in their products. Western governments hit back, saying spy programmes are needed to keep us all safe.

The potential threat of terrorism, plotted in secret using encryption, intensifies the debate.

Prior to the November attacks in Paris, both the US and UK were planning new laws to strengthen their power against encryption.

Now support for these laws has grown. The debate will come to a head in the next few months as politicians finalise the proposed legislation.

Cryptographers are also realising they can no longer stand

silent. In a talk last month, Phillip Rogaway, a computer scientist at the University of California, Davis, asked his colleagues to move beyond mathematical puzzle solving and consider the morality of their work: “Cryptography rearranges power. This makes [it] an inherently political tool.”

What are the possible outcomes? These sketches are fictional, but the future worlds they portray could easily become real. Which one do you want? n

2. build back doors

High street booms as online shops stall

hackers crack weakened online services

Lengthy queues at banks, since you can’t transfer money online any more. No more Amazon, but high street shops are crammed. Yet terrorist attacks

If you send a letter, the government can steam it open and read the contents.

If you make a phone call, the government can listen in. Why

back doors and leak personal emails on a global scale, leading to mass panic.

No one is sure how many more hacking groups had

continue unabated, while the underground cryptography trade booms.

Ordinary people were hit hardest when encryption was banned in 2016, as it is now illegal to conduct secure

should online communication be any different?

This argument convinced UK politicians to vote the Investigatory Powers Bill into law in 2016. It required companies to “maintain

been quietly accessing our data before the brash light of publicity from Anonymous forced a rethink. There are even suggestions that ISIS exploited back doors to gain intelligence on high-profile bombing targets.

online using the unregulatable cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Some do so to maintain their pre-ban lifestyle, while others make a profit selling hacked data.

Meanwhile, illegal encryption software is continually being developed – encryption is an idea that isn’t going to go away. Terrorists barely notice the ban and continue to organise attacks

permanent interception capabilities, including maintaining the ability to remove any encryption”. The US and other countries soon followed suit.

But we soon learned that the analogy was false, and efforts to give the government access to encrypted data have put us all in danger.

The laws forced companies to introduce weak points in their services that governments can use for access. It only took a few years for Anonymous to announce it

as before.

had discovered one of these

transactions online. Banking or shopping online without using encryption is like sticking cash to a postcard and sending it to Amazon by mail, so everyone stopped.

People had thought the interests of companies whose businesses rely on encryption would make this ban impossible; that encryption was just too profitable.

Governments insisted a ban was the only way to stay safe.

But the mathematics of encryption cannot be legislated out of existence. Those willing

Bloomberg/Getty

1. Ban Encryption

“We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet and we have to do something”

to defy the law still buy and sell 20 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

Donald Trump, US Republican presidential candidate

“Do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?”

David Cameron, UK prime minister

Bloomberg/Getty

WE NEED to talk about secrets.

Offline, we use locked cabinets, vaults and doors to keep our affairs private and our money safe. Online, this process hinges on one technology: encryption.

We use it every day when we check our email, access our bank account or shop online. It runs in the background, unnoticed.

But encryption is now in the spotlight. Should the maths that underpins it be banned in the name of foiling terrorist plans,

Chris McGrath/Getty

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology

Digital revolution!

Encryption has become a vital part of modern society.

Would you fight for it?

4. Total encryption

Big tech vs big brother

all out encryption beats cybercrime

The row over encryption came to a head in 2016. Apple CEO Tim Cook threatened to withdraw the iPhone from sale anywhere that banned secure communication

It all started with Ashley Madison. When the breach of the adulterous dating site in 2015 led to divorces and even suicides after profiles were

to protect us. But with cybercrime levels nose-diving, the FBI and other enforcement agencies found they had more resources to put into targeted,

leaked online, people began to wake up to the dangers of unencrypted data. But it was only after a string of further hacks in 2017, including on the UK’s centralised medical record service care.data, that the

on-the-ground surveillance, enabling them to tail potential terrorists and foil a number of serious plots threatening the UK and US. In our more secure world, an elderly Edward Snowden has been pardoned by the US for leaking state secrets, and allowed to return home.

Rather than breaking encryption and hoovering up more data, the security services focused on finding leads on terrorists in the data they already had, to avoid missing clues in plain sight.

These days, no one is bothered about encryption.

It operates in the background of some services, but people still send unencrypted emails,

public started clamouring for protection.

Tech firms continued the encryption roll-out started as a result of the Snowden leaks, while cryptographers stepped up research on new and easier-to-use techniques to protect our data. At the same time, laws were brought in requiring that any unencrypted database be air-gapped – that is, removed from any kind of network – to significantly reduce the possibility of a hack.

The security services protested at first, saying these

tweets and text messages.

moves would harm their ability

around the world to convince politicians to change their minds.

One enterprising developer even whipped up an app to email David Cameron, Barack Obama and other world leaders a petition with just a single tap.

Governments realised they had crossed a line. Sure, the US National Security Agency could read our emails – but take away our iPhones? Unthinkable. So Cameron, Obama and the rest backed down, shelving their new laws. After all, it turned out that the Paris attackers used unencrypted communications to carry out their massacre.

“If you halt or weaken encryption, the people that you hurt are not the folks that want to do bad things” Tim Cook, Apple CEO

“Encrypt everything, from calls to texts” Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower

Andrew Kelly/Reuters

or demanded back doors.

The firm’s encrypted iMessage service was an essential part of the device, he said.

With the prospect of losing their iPhones, protesters massed at Apple stores in cities

Karl Mondon/Zumapress/Corbis

3. Status Quo

2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 21

Technology

ONE PER CENT

RoboTutor is a class act AI will help us learn, and with no need for exams, finds Aviva Rutkin

Michael Gottschalk /getty

by looking at a few dozen other questions they had already answered. Piech presented the results at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Montreal, Canada, last month.

Piech envisions a more sophisticated version that not only predicts which questions a student is likely to get wrong, but also understands why. It would be nice, says Piech, “if we could all afford a really expensive tutor who could spend time thinking about what you should learn”. That’s not realistic, but we could one day just use this type of software to pinpoint where someone is struggling and help them improve.

Eventually, the system could become accurate enough to do away with exams altogether, he says. “Our intuition tells us if you pay enough attention to what a student did as they were learning, you wouldn’t need to have them sit down and do a test.”

The algorithm is a significant advance in the state of the art, says Tamara Sumner of the University of Colorado, Boulder. “What is particularly impressive is that this approach does not require significant human input to annotate training data or handcraft models of expertise.”

Neil Heffernan, a computer scientist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, agrees that it’s important to develop better ways to predict students’ performance. But he wonders whether the new system is of any practical value: can it, for instance, tell us how to better teach students of different backgrounds or skill levels?

“What does that mean, to be able to do a much better job at predicting stuff?” he asks. “I wish we could turn that into something –Confused? The system can tell– that’s meaningful.” n

22 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

You pressed for food?

It doesn’t get better than this.

Or do we mean lazier? Developer Stavros Korokithakis has cobbled together a button he can press when wants food. When he pushes the internet-connected button, a takeaway delivery is requested from a website. He was inspired by Amazon Dash buttons, which let customers order more of a product when they are running low.

“You press a button and get food.

Like a lab rat. Wirelessly. We are truly living in the future,” he says.

100 million The number of people cut off from

WhatsApp in Brazil last week, after courts blocked the chat app as part of a criminal investigation.

Dating app hack Details are leaking out again.

In December, hackers revealed that they had stolen the personal information of almost 5000 users of Hzone, a dating app for people who have HIV. Accounts included the user’s location, demographic details and messages containing sensitive medical information.

Hzone is the latest in a string of dating services – including Tinder and Ashley Madison – that have lost information to hacks because it isn’t held securely enough.

ALEX QUESADA/eyevine

HOW do you show that you know maths problems set on the online what you know? Often, you have learning platform Khan Academy, no choice but to take a test. and the corresponding scores.

A new algorithm could both They also trained a neural improve your knowledge and do network to sort questions by type: away with formal tests altogether. those involving square roots, the Developed by researchers at slope of graphs, or calculating Stanford University and Google where a line meets the horizontal in California, it analyses students’ axis on a graph, for example. performance on past practice “ If you pay enough problems, identifies where they attention to the student as tend to go wrong and forms a picture of their overall knowledge. they learn, you don’t need to test them at the end” The idea of using software to track a student’s progress isn’t new. But few attempts so far have With all this information, the exploited deep learning, the system then began to learn each cutting-edge discipline of making student’s capabilities on each machines learn by digesting large question type. amounts of data.

The model could predict Chris Piech at Stanford and his with up to 85 per cent accuracy team fed their system more than whether a student would get a 1.4 million student answers to new exercise right or wrong, just

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Pronouncing Classical Latin Introduction to Third-Conjugation Verbs Introduction to the Subjunctive Mood The Irregular Verbs Sum and Possum Introduction to Third-Declension Nouns Third-Declension Neuter Nouns First- and Second-Declension Adjectives First- and Second-Declension Nouns Introduction to the Passive Voice Third -io and Fourth-Conjugation Verbs First- and Second-Conjugation Verbs Reading a Famous Latin Love Poem The Present Passive of All Conjugations Third-Declension Adjectives Third-Declension I-Stem Nouns The Relative Pronoun The Imperfect and Future Tenses Building Translation Skills Using the Subjunctive Mood Demonstrative Adjectives and Pronouns The Perfect Tense Active System Forming and Using Participles Using the Infinitive Reading a Passage from Caesar The Perfect Tense Passive System Deponent Verbs Conditional Sentences Cum Clauses and Stipulations Reading Excerpts from Roman Law Interrogative Adjectives and Pronouns Fourth- and Fifth-Declension Nouns Gerunds and Gerundives Counting in Latin More on Irregular Verbs Comparison of Adjectives and Adverbs Next Steps in Reading Latin

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Living Health

Big data, better health Powerful cloud-based computers can crunch medical records to predict and prevent painful – and expensive – health issues

Take a moment to think about the data associated with your health. Over the years, you’ve probably had X-rays and scans of various kinds, including perhaps an ultrasound or two. Then there are blood tests, body weight and height measurements… The list is long.

This already amounts to a large amount of information about your body and your state of health. But it will soon be dwarfed by the data generated by genetic tests, chemical tests and other blood-marker tests, in addition to the advanced scans and activity trackers that are becoming available.

It is easy to imagine that adding this wealth of information to your electronic patient record will lead to some kind of medical nirvana in which doctors run a predictive analytics algorithm over your “big data” to forecast your future health issues.

Easy to imagine – hard to do. One of the key challenges this raises is planning: the technology that will store and analyse this data has to be right from the start. The UK’s National Health Service – which is poised to embrace the big data revolution over the next five years – admits in its Five Year Forward View that its approach to IT so far has left it with “systems that don’t talk to each other” and which “fail to

“ The main challenge is getting health data into the system in a meaningful form” John Huffman, Chief Technology Officer, Philips Healthcare

Maruthappu, a doctor and a leading light in the NHS’s Innovation Accelerator programme.

“Google factored in how to scale up its search service from day one and has successfully scaled it up to work for over a billion users,” he told a health innovation conference in Manchester in September. Health systems have to be similarly scalable, he says.

Why? Because such a system will be used by tens of millions of users: it needs to be available at GP practices, walk-in centres and hospitals across the nation, too, so that falling ill 200 kilometres from home will no longer mean a local doctor cannot call up your patient record. Indeed, the NHS is planning to make medical records available nationally – online and via smartphone – by 2018.

Making meaningful analytical use of data that has come from devices such as gene sequencers, diabetic glucose meters and heart-rate sensors in smart watches is no simple matter. These kinds of devices generate significant amounts of data. More than 250 million patients around the world are tracked with Philips patient monitors – the company makes one out of every two patient monitors in the world. It also manages 18 petabytes of data for healthcare providers.

Root of the problem

Computers and other smart devices will access health-data analysis in the cloud

harness the benefits of interoperable systems”.

In future, big data standards will have to be nationally specified, the NHS says.

The technology that makes this possible has rapidly emerged in recent years: always-on, available-everywhere cloud computing services. Cloud computing allows data to be made available to authorised users anywhere, allowing analytics algorithms that predict and help prevent sickness to be developed and run on those data. “You couldn’t do this at all without the cloud,” says John Huffman, chief technology officer of Philips Healthcare in San Francisco, California. “It’s the cloud that will provide the ubiquitous access to health data.”

But exploiting big data is about much more than making systems compatible. “This will need to work like Google,” says Mahiben

But crucially, the data that represents health parameters is unstructured and varies enormously. “Unstructured data is the root of all our problems with electronic medical records. Analytics is not the problem – for the most part, we are refining methods that are already mature,” says Huffman.

“The main challenge is getting data into the system in a meaningful form so that you can analyse it,” he says. For instance, a simple record of your daily step counts from a smartphone app is entirely different to the results of a genetic test, since genes interact with each other and a test result can in fact have multiple meanings depending, for instance, on the patient’s environment.

So Philips and its partners are working out how to best extract meaning from medical big data in what is turning out to be a burgeoning business of healthcare-algorithm development.

The essential challenge, Huffman says, is that conventional electronic medical records use a very rigid database structure whereas Philips’ approach is to cut the data some slack and use a flexible format that allows, say, a verbal symptom description, as well as

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“ We’re able to help individuals get better care in the comfort of their own homes” John Huffman

numerical data, to be input. “You need to be able to embed things like a surgeon’s description of a tumour, or a nurse’s note on adverse events like a patient having difficulty sleeping,” he says.

Once that unstructured data is in the system the idea then is to apply machine-learning algorithms or neural networks to seek out patterns that predict from historic data what your future health outcomes are likely to be, but also to diagnose existing conditions earlier and thereby improve outcomes for patients.

SIMON FRASER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Predict the future But does it work? To find out, Banner Health of Phoenix, Arizona, in partnership with Philips, decided to put these algorithmic diagnostics to the test on patients with chronic conditions like congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and type 2 diabetes.

With 5 per cent of people with such chronic diseases accounting for about half of all healthcare spending, due to their frequent readmissions to hospital, Banner Health decided to take proactive action to try to reduce the need to readmit.

To do this, it equipped 135 patients with telehealth monitoring technology at home. And a mobile intensive care team was equipped to respond to wireless alerts from the sensors – allowing them to visit patients’ homes and intervene at the first sign of trouble.

The results have been described as “dramatic” by Banner Health’s senior medical director, Hargobind Khurana. The predictive, algorithm-fuelled approach reduced hospitalisations by 45 per cent, care costs by 27 per cent and acute response costs by 32 per cent. The trial, started in May, is ongoing and now has over 500 patients enrolled.

But it’s about more than hard-nosed cost savings, says Huffman, who believes that the important point is the benefit to patients: “We’re able to help these individuals get better care in the comfort of their own homes.” n This story is part of a series exploring the way innovation is improving health.

For more, visit newscientist.com/living_health

Aperture

26 | NewScientist | 2 00 January Month2016 2016

Landscape in scarlet GUSTAV KLIMT would like it. This mosaic of scarlet, beige and grey looks like a detail from one of the Austrian artist’s studies in shape, colour and geometry.

But on closer inspection, the solitary cloud floating across the picture gives the game away. This is a satellite image of one of Italy’s most fertile regions, taken from more than 780 kilometres up by Sentinel 2A, launched last June by the European Space Agency. The densely packed rectangles are fields in Abruzzi, central Italy, imaged in false colour by the satellite’s multispectral camera. The pinks and reds show chlorophyll, indicating the crops and vegetation abundant in early July, when this picture was taken.

A verdant mountain looms in the lower left of the image while the town of Avezzano and its untidy industrial area lie just to the north.

The fields divide up a region that used to hold the country’s third-largest body of water, Lake Fucino. With no natural outlet, the lake regularly flooded surrounding areas and was a breeding ground for malaria, so in 1862 a canal was built to drain it – a massive operation financed by Prince Alessandro Torlonia. It wasn’t purely a sense of civic duty that drove him on. In return for his efforts, Torlonia’s family was given the fertile land. It was parcelled up and sold in small slices to farmers in the early 1950s.

There’s an unusual detail tucked away in this agricultural scene. The Fucino Space Centre is visible towards the lower right of the plain, surrounded on all sides by fields. As well as 170 antennas, it houses the control centre for Europe’s answer to GPS, Galileo. Ten of the planned 30 Galileo satellites are now in orbit.

Niall Firth

Photograph Copernicus Sentinel data (2015) ESA

00 2 January Month 2016 | NewScientist | 27

OPINION

Terminate these bots The machine revolution has not yet arrived, concludes Jeff Hecht after braving the customer care computers DID holiday shopping – or postholiday returns – find you, like me, cursing at a computer over the phone? If so, you were not alone.

The growing number of customerservice lines with computerised speech systems spread little joy.

Normally I try to avoid calling, but could find no alternative after a website botched a software order. The voice that greeted me identified itself as a computer, but sounded almost human, and I could hear a keyboard as I tried to explain the problem. For a moment, I was almost fooled into thinking a person was on the line, pretending to be a robot, but realised the simulated typing was too even to be real.

The computer also proved to be dumber than it sounded. It claimed to be looking something up, but eventually admitted it didn’t understand what I had said.

I tried again with no luck, and

after another few goes, it became clear that the computer had not been programmed to deal with order mistakes. I asked to speak to a human. It ignored me. Again I asked for “agent”, “operator” or “human”, in quick succession.

It failed to recognise my annoyance and the insults that followed and switch the call to a person (although that is being worked on). Eventually, I hung up. Such systems are a misuse of speech recognition technology.

In some circumstances this technology can be good. I used speech recognition successfully a decade ago after breaking an elbow. However, I had to train that system for half an hour to understand my voice, and I took care to speak clearly and carefully into a good microphone in a quiet room. Human speech and accents differ widely enough for such training to be crucial if a

What a drag Tighter regulation could stub out the switch from smoking to vaping, says Marcus Munafò SMOKERS smoke for the nicotine, but die from the tar. So said psychiatrist Michael Russell, who pioneered effective treatments to help people stop smoking.

Electronic cigarettes provide the nicotine without the tar, and are increasingly seen as an effective aid to quitting smoking.

The second and third-generation 28 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

meet the revised European Union Tobacco Products Directive – or else gain approval as medical devices. Similar changes are under way in the US. The fear is that many products will fall by the wayside, and this could put smokers off switching to vaping.

There are some valid reasons for caution over e-cigarettes. We need to monitor their use by the young and prevent children from buying them, although what little use there is among teenagers is

versions mimic smoking even better, in that they appear more effective at delivering nicotine.

But just as e-cigarettes have taken hold, regulators are poised to gain new powers that will limit “ We need a light touch that what is on sale and to whom. In recognises the innovation the UK, e-cigarettes have been behind effective treated as consumer products, alternatives to cigarettes” but from this year will have to

mostly by those that already smoke. Beyond this, most concerns focus on the variable standards to which products are made, the fact that nicotine is not only addictive but also toxic, and so on.

However, concerns over safety of vapour and nicotine cartridges are overstated, given that we breathe polluted air daily and store toxic bleach in our homes.

And it is not clear that nicotine on its own is as addictive as when it is part of tobacco smoke, which contains chemicals that may enhance its addictive effect.

Regulation can also have unintended consequences,

For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

Jeff Hecht is a New Scientist consultant

especially when only large firms have the resources to navigate it.

E-Voke, similar to first-generation “cigalike” devices, has UK medical device approval and is available on prescription for smokers wishing to quit. Its maker?

British American Tobacco.

Rather than regulating in a way that will force out many devices that ex-smokers prefer, a lighter touch is appropriate: one that recognises the innovation that created effective, even enjoyable alternatives to cigarettes. n Marcus Munafò studies addiction and is a professor of biological psychology at the University of Bristol, UK

One minute interview

Pragmatic but 25 years late At the close of the Paris summit , climate politics veteran Michael Jacobs gave his verdict on the deal to curb global warming between what is being done and what needs to be done]. Because of that, the pressures will be more than they were before. We don’t know whether they will succeed. It partly depends on the technologies – but my god the countries have put pressure on themselves to get there.

Profile Michael Jacobs is senior adviser at the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, Paris, and a researcher at University College London.

From 2007 to 2010 he was special adviser to the then UK prime minister Gordon Brown

Many scientists say the Paris deal should have included quantified targets on the size and timing of emission cuts to meet its 1.5 °C and 2 °C goals. Why were they left out?

I think it would have been a very bad idea to have those targets in there. It is much better to have a clear end goal, and a five-year review cycle to get us there. This is a bottom-up process. The architecture of this agreement is to have strong global goals, a nationally determined process of commitments, and then come back every five years and say: “We didn’t do enough, let’s have another go.” That’s the only way of doing it in this world. There is no way to impose commitments on countries, it can’t be done.

Will this approach be enough to get strong action on climate change?

No agreement could ever guarantee that countries will do enough. The countries are putting huge pressure on themselves. Every five years we will have an emissions gap to a 2 °C goal and an emissions gap to a 1.5 °C goal [the gap

There’s a lot of talk about the role of technology...

What is remarkable is that since Copenhagen in 2009, the price of solar has dropped by 80 to 90 per cent. Two years ago none of us thought renewable energy storage was anywhere near ready. Now we’ve got home storage for electricity from renewables being marketed by Tesla and others. Over the next five years the development of technologies and the drop in price could make it possible to improve on 2020 commitments. That’s what this deal is designed to drive.

How about concerns that the 1.5 °C and 2 °C targets are based on climate models that assume we will suck large amounts of out of the air by planting biofuels, for example?

Most of those models include negative emissions [the technical term for sucking carbon out of the air] in the second half of the century. It’s quite a long time away, so we’ve got time to improve those technologies. Carbon capture and storage may start to be implemented more widely than it is now, but it’s a huge challenge.

Action now is quite ambitious compared with where it has been in the past. The reason we’re off-track is not because countries are not committing to enough now, it’s because they are starting 25 years too late.

The agreement doesn’t start until 2020.

What needs to happen now?

Countries need to continue current efforts.

There’s a lot to do before this agreement starts to ensure the baseline for action is better. The European Union and others who are going to overachieve their climate targets for 2020 should see what more they can do.

Interview by Catherine Brahic

2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 29

courtesy of michael jacobs

computer is to translate speech into text successfully.

Customer helplines are a very different matter, because they must recognise what a caller says from the first word. That’s called universal speech recognition, and is much harder because it must accommodate the wide variation in accents and how voices sound.

The fact you are talking via a phone line rather than directly to the computer doesn’t help. The telephone network typically cuts off frequencies above 3400 hertz that are needed to distinguish between consonants such as “d” and “t”. Speech compression on busy cellphone networks degrades quality still further.

Even when it comes to textbased systems, computers aren’t that good at understanding questions, as one quickly learns when trying to explain a problem to online chatbots.

Humans remain much better at answering questions and resolving complaints. After my run-in with the automated system, I managed to reach a person the following Monday. He quickly understood the problem, sent me a code to download the proper software, and apologised on behalf of the computer. n

OPINION INTERVIEW

Show me you are there What if some people who seem to be in a vegetative state actually have conscious awareness, asks Joseph Fins

Your work concerns the tough questions raised when brain injuries affect consciousness. Why is this issue so important to you?

We have only recently come to realise that a subset of people diagnosed as being in a vegetative state were not vegetative at all. They were not permanently unconscious; in fact, they were conscious. We now know this as the minimally conscious state. It struck me as a human rights issue, that these people who had the ability to interact and be aware at some level were sequestered in nursing homes.

So in your book, Rights Come to Mind, you decided to tell their stories.

I interviewed more than 50 families of people who had come to Cornell and Rockefeller for our studies on how the brain recovers from disorders of consciousness. I felt a tremendous moral obligation to give a voice to these voiceless people and their families who were struggling, often in isolation and overwhelmed by grief.

Much of the book is about how families make decisions as surrogates about what they think is right. In some ways, it is easier to make decisions about someone who is completely unconscious. When someone is there and able to interact at some level, even minimally so, there’s a tremendous amount of ambiguity.

You illustrate these dilemmas with the story of Maggie Worthen. Tell me about her.

Maggie was a senior in college when a brainstem stroke left her in what was thought to be a permanent vegetative state. Two years later, her mother sought us out, wanting to find out if Maggie had some awareness. We were able to demonstrate behaviourally, and then with neuroimaging, that she was indeed minimally conscious.

We found that Maggie was able to respond using one eye, much like Jean-Dominique 30 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

Bauby, author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, who had locked-in syndrome. One time, my colleague Nicholas Schiff pointed to Maggie’s mother and asked “Is that your mother?” There was this long pause, and then this downward swoop of Maggie’s eye – which meant “yes”. Then Maggie’s mother started sobbing on my shoulder. That was a pivotal moment because it validated what she thought she had seen in her daughter’s responsiveness.

We’ve known about the minimally conscious state since 2002. Why is misdiagnosis still a problem?

Profile Joseph Fins is professor of medical ethics and medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, New York City, and co-director of CASBI, the Consortium for the Advanced Study of Brain Injury. His new book is Rights Come to Mind: Brain injury, ethics, and the struggle for consciousness

The challenge with the minimally conscious state is that the behavioural manifestations are intermittent, so cannot always be reproduced.

That makes it complicated to identify and the misdiagnosis rate is high. One study showed that 41 per cent of people with traumatic brain injuries in nursing homes diagnosed as vegetative were actually minimally conscious.

I argue that we have to prepare society for the consequences of advances in neuroscience which will expose us to new problems, but also give us opportunities to find new solutions.

What kinds of scientific advances are changing the picture?

Neuroimaging can help us find out if these people are responsive and conscious.

Neuroscience has made us aware of this situation, and may also help to deal with it, through neuroprosthetics, deep brain stimulation, other devices and drugs. But fundamentally, it’s a societal issue because now we have people we treat who deserve more than we have traditionally given them.

What was it like being part of the first team to try deep brain stimulation to help improve the consciousness of people with brain injuries?

That work started through my collaboration

with Nicholas Schiff, who is at Weill Cornell with me. We were interested in the disconnect between what you see overtly and what is going on internally. He had this idea of using deep brain stimulation to help restore functional communication in the minimally conscious state.

That presented a huge ethical challenge: how do you do research on someone who can’t give consent? I spent the better part of 10 years working on the ethical formulation that would make such work possible. That project was published in Nature in 2007.

For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

Photographed for New Scientist by Martin Adolfsson

treated. A recent study showed that 22 per cent of people with a disorder of consciousness will recover enough to live independently.

Most people are staggered when they hear that number.

What is the paradox you talk about between care people get at the start of treatment and later on?

People who have traumatic brain injuries initially receive brilliant medical care that saves their life. But one of the paradoxes around the misdiagnosis rate of a minimally conscious state is that after a traumatic brain injury, people often end up in chronic care facilities because they’re not considered ready for rehabilitation. But once there, they often don’t come back.

So you’re saying the chance to improve their condition is missed?

Yes. Somebody may be in the vegetative state when they’re discharged from hospital. They might end up in a nursing home and then

“ I felt a tremendous moral obligation to give a voice to these voiceless people” start exhibiting responsive behaviours that are intermittent; a doctor is called but they are not reproduced. If the doctor doesn’t know about this new science, they might ascribe it to family denial when it’s actually the biology of the minimally conscious state.

I describe cases like this in the book. Terry Wallis, for example, started talking 19 years after his injury. His family thought they saw things throughout that time, but it wasn’t until he emerged from the minimally conscious state and started talking that people appreciated he had been minimally conscious for most of those 19 years.

We found that deep brain stimulation could lead to improvements in attention, limb control and spoken language. A subject in the trial was in a minimally conscious state after being assaulted, and through this procedure gained enough coordination to eat by mouth.

You talk about these issues in a very hopeful way, but many of the experiences of people in your book are pretty awful.

Let me just preface this by saying that I’m not trying to romanticise these brain states.

Nobody would choose to be this way. But

after a brain injury, families first hope their loved one will survive and wake up.

Then they hope that when they wake up they’re conscious. Then they hope that when they’re conscious they’re more than minimally conscious – but then they end up in a place they didn’t necessarily expect to reach. We are not trying to romanticise this brain state. We’re trying to help these people regain as much functional capacity as they can.

There’s a subset of patients who can and will get better if identified and properly

Can people who recover help change perceptions of what it’s like to live with these kinds of brain injury?

The problem is that the people who were minimally conscious don’t remember that time. Everybody wants to know what they were thinking. But they don’t remember because the hippocampus, where memory resides, is one of the most exquisitely sensitive parts of the brain to injury and other kinds of trauma – so they don’t have a recollection.

But their stories are becoming exemplars of why we should be worried. n Interview by Catherine de Lange 2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 31

COVER STORY

Can exploding black holes reveal the true fabric of space-time?

Stuart Clark picks at the seams

O

N 2 NOVEMBER 2012, an intense burst of radio waves flashed across the skies above the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. There was no spectacular fireworks display visible to human eyes, but the signal was captured by the 305-metre-wide radio dish of the Arecibo Observatory, nestled among the island’s forest-covered peaks.

Radio astronomers had been waiting for one of these for a while: a fast radio burst.

Lasting only a few thousandths of a second, these super-bright pulses are thought to come from deep space, and are extremely rare. The Arecibo burst was only the eleventh ever detected. There was a suspicion that all previous readings, from a single radio telescope in Australia, were down to a technical glitch.

They weren’t. But what these strange pulses are remains a mystery. Some think they come from super-dense stars or black holes dancing with those stars. Some have even floated the idea – one few people are willing to buy – that they could be “hailing signals” from aliens.

The latest idea is that they could encode something equally astonishing: a signal from black holes behaving in an entirely new way.

If so, it would transform our understanding of these most enigmatic cosmic objects, and mark the beginning of the end of a quest to reconcile two fundamentally irreconcilable descriptions of the physical universe. It might even explain the beginning of it all.

32 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

“That’s our big excitement for all this,” says theorist Hal Haggard of Bard College in Red Hook, New York, who has worked on the theory. “But I’m being a little cautious.”

The idea grows out of the rift between general relativity, which explains how space and time curve to create gravity, and quantum theory. Quantum theory describes the behaviour of natural force fields, such as those associated with electricity and magnetism, and the subatomic particles, or quanta, that make up those fields. To do this, it assumes that space and time are a fixed and rigid framework through which these fields pass – while general relativity, formulated by Einstein almost exactly 100 years ago, insists that space and time are malleable fields in their own right. But if space-time is a field, presumably quantum theory must apply, meaning it can be subdivided into little bits.

It’s a fundamentally confusing picture, and nowhere does that become more dramatically apparent than in our attempts to understand black holes. These regions of space-time in which matter is so dense and gravity so overwhelming that nothing can escape are, in essence, the ultimate cosmic trash compactors. Once something falls in, whether it’s a photon or an idealistic NASA pilot thrown off course by a Hollywood scriptwriter, it never comes out.

At least this is what general relativity tells us. According to Einstein’s theory, all matter

ends up at the centre of the black hole where it forms a singularity: a pinprick of infinite density at which the laws of physics break down. This is where today’s cosmologists disagree with Einstein. “No physicist really believes that is what happens,” says Haggard.

Hence the search for a successful theory of quantum gravity, which would explain how gravity behaves over extremely small distances, such as those in the centre of a black hole. The problem is, we have no clue what such a theory would look like. General relativity has never flunked a test; no one has ever measured a signal that it can’t neatly explain. Until we do, theorists are working in the dark.

“We are in dire need of a guiding light to show us the correct path to quantum gravity,” says theorist Thomas Sotiriou at the University of Nottingham, UK. “It would be one of the most important discoveries you could make.” Hence the interest in the fast radio bursts. “If you could observe a black hole doing something that does not come from general relativity, that would be a revolution,” says Sotiriou.

bose collins

lo o py b i t s The new idea comes from work Haggard did with Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of Aix-Marseille, France.

Rovelli is one of the founders of a model for a unified theory known as loop quantum gravity. It proposes that space-time is made of interlocking loops that form a fabric akin to chain mail. When seen from afar, this fabric looks smooth and continuous, but viewed close up it is woven from tiny, indivisible pieces. These loops would be the fundamental quanta of space-time; nothing could be smaller.

When Rovelli and Haggard considered what loop quantum gravity would mean for black holes, they came up with a startling conclusion: a black hole would eventually reach a density at which loopy bits of spacetime could shrink no more. According to their calculations, published in 2014, there would be no singularity. Instead the loops would generate an outward pressure, resulting in a “quantum bounce” – an explosion > 2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 33

that would destroy the black hole.

This is not the first time physicists have toyed with black holes doing unexpected disappearing tricks. Stephen Hawking suggested a mechanism based on the laws of thermodynamics, which govern heat and energy, that would make a black hole evaporate, albeit over a stupendous length of time. More recently, Abraham Loeb of Harvard University suggested that black holes could appear to explode if they were surrounded by a veil of matter that suddenly dissipated.

Rovelli and Haggard’s bouncing black holes are different. Most importantly, their quantum bounce would create a white hole, a massive object that spews out particles and radiation. “It’s like running a movie of a black hole in reverse,” he says. “The white hole emits particles but never absorbs them.”

Haggard has calculated that white holes are possible under the mathematical rules laid out by the equations of general relativity for the behaviour of space-time. But that does not mean a black hole actually does turn into its belching alter ego. “Stitching together different space-time solutions does not prove it is possible for a black hole to evolve into a white hole,” says Sotiriou.

Haggard and Rovelli think the transition could be the result of a quantum phenomenon called tunnelling, which allows subatomic

particles to spontaneously change from one state to another. Quantum tunnelling underlies nuclear fusion, among other things.

In our sun, it allows protons to overcome an otherwise insurmountable energy barrier in order to fuse and release energy.

It is not so crazy to think that quantum gravity could be subject to the same peculiar ways. Haggard and Rovelli’s idea is that all the matter collapsing to form a black hole

“AT S TA K E a r e n o t o n ly B L A C K H OL E S a n d s pace -t i m e , B U T T H E sta r t o f e v e r y th i n g ” singularity can never actually reach that point.

As it approaches the size of an individual space-time loop, the probability that the entire black hole undergoes a quantum tunnelling event becomes greater and greater, until boing! It suddenly becomes a white hole (see diagram, below).

Not everyone is convinced: Sotiriou for one thinks the process is too much of a conceptual leap.“That definitely goes against conventional wisdom,” he says.

“I think that needs clarification before this idea can be taken seriously.”

Ultimate rebound According to the theory of loop quantum gravity, space-time is made of tiny, indivisible loops. As a black hole collapses, the pressure of these loops could cause it to rebound explosively, forming a “white hole” that spews out matter

SPACE-TIME LOOP

MATTER IN

MATTER OUT

BLACK HOLE

34 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

WHITE HOLE

The best way to persuade the doubters would be to spot a black hole in the throes of such an explosive reversal. In 2014, Rovelli and two colleagues – Aurélian Barrau at the University of Grenoble in France and Francesca Vidotto of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands – set out to determine how such an event would make itself known.

They got together at a conference in Trieste, Italy, and calculated that an exploding black hole would generate signals at a wavelength equal to its diameter. In that sense, black holes are rather like loudspeakers: larger ones transmit longer wavelengths, or lower pitches, than smaller versions. Assuming that the exploding specimens were primordial black holes – a class of small black hole thought to have formed in the gravitationally violent aftermath of the big bang – they came up with a wavelength of a few millimetres. In other words, the expected signal was on the boundary between infrared and radio waves.

This rang a bell for Vidotto. She thought back to the mysterious ping from the Arecibo Observatory, and realised that its wavelength was in the same ballpark as their prediction for a signal from bouncing black holes.

That was especially exciting given how rare these events seem to be. Fast radio bursts were discovered in 2006, when radio astronomer Duncan Lorimer, then newly arrived at the University of West Virginia in Morgantown, was sifting through an old set of data from the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. One signal stood out. “We just didn’t know what to make of it, it was so bright,” says Lorimer. After a further hard look, he concluded that the signal was not a technical snafu and almost certainly came from the far reaches of the universe – although he could not figure out what had produced it.

Only nine more of these fast radio bursts have been detected since, all from Parkes data, leading to questions about whether it was a quirk of the telescope – that is, until 2012 and the Arecibo signal.

It is easy to see why Rovelli and his colleagues are energised by that burst, which was announced to the world in 2014.

But though their predictions for an exploding black hole signal and the fast radio bursts so far are a close match, they are not a perfect one. Then again, the calculations are based on an estimate for the mass of a black hole, which is in turn based on an estimate of how long a bounce would take.

Narrowing things down means tweaking the theory to take into account effects such

Australia’s Parkes Observatory saw most of the mysterious radio bursts

produced by exploding black holes might offer an alternative route to validation: blasts of super-high-energy photons known as gamma rays. Much like radio bursts, the precise gamma ray signal emitted by an exploding black hole emits is determined by the total amount of matter and energy contained within. The signals would be distinct from the gamma ray bursts that astronomers regularly see, and right now we wouldn’t be able to detect them.

There is, however, a new observatory currently under consideration: the Cherenkov Telescope Array, which would boast more than a hundred telescopes spread over two sites in Spain and Chile. It should be capable of spotting these signature bursts but will not be ready until 2023, assuming it gets the go-ahead.

Yury Prokopenko/Getty

BIG BOING?

as time dilation. Under the laws of relativity, time slows down in a gravitational field. The stronger the force field produced by a massive object, the slower time will run. A clock on a spacecraft orbiting 10,000 kilometres above Earth runs faster than a clock on the surface because the planet’s gravitational field weakens with distance. So in a black hole, where the field is about as strong as it can be, time pretty much comes to a standstill – for an outside observer at least.

The twist is that we experience time passing at the same rate wherever we are. So let’s imagine you could witness a quantum bounce from inside a black hole. For you the explosion would take milliseconds, but for anyone outside it would appear to take billions of years because the black hole generates such a strong gravitational field.

Now consider that the more massive the black hole, the stronger its gravity and so the greater the extent of the time dilation, meaning bigger black holes would appear to take longer to bounce. This gives Rovelli and his colleagues a potential way to test their

hypothesis. Primordial black holes are generally tiny, isolated objects, their size fixed at their birth shortly after the big bang.

If the theory is right, they are like ticking time bombs whose clock is set by their mass. The smaller ones will experience less time dilation, and so from our perspective will explode earlier in cosmic history. These explosions should also generate fast radio bursts at shorter wavelengths.

In other words, distant fast radio bursts should have shorter wavelengths than nearby ones – a pattern we would not expect to observe if the bursts had any other origin.

“If we saw this, it would be extremely strong confirmation for our idea,” says Rovelli.

At the moment, all known fast radio bursts have been relatively close, so the change of wavelength with distance cannot yet be tested.

Also, with only 11 of them, there are too few for any serious statistical analysis. So now it is a waiting game. Over time, researchers hope to detect more fast radio bursts and build up a proper data set.

Another type of signal thought to be

There is a lot at stake here – our understanding of not just black holes and space-time, but also the origin of the universe. There is only one other place where general relativity predicts a singularity arising: at the very moment of the big bang. But if the granularity of space‑time prevents singularities happening in the first place, how did our cosmos come about? Perhaps not with a big bang, but with a big boing.

The big bounce hypothesis has been around for a while, and says that our universe was not born of an explosion that came out of nothing, but from a previous universe that collapsed. The new idea fits with that picture: as all the matter in that doomed cosmos came together in a catastrophic crunch, an enormous quantum bounce would have taken place once it reached the scale of the individual loops of space-time. This would have set our big bang in motion.

Lest anyone gets too carried away, however, there are more prosaic ideas to consider.

Lorimer thinks fast radio bursts are most probably produced by young versions of rapidly-spinning neutron stars known as pulsars. This idea is “perfectly consistent with what we see”, he says, and is “grounded in things that we really understand”.

If so, it would resign us to yet another false start for quantum gravity. But then perhaps the mysterious signals really are the call sign of a distant alien civilisation, and they can tell us where we are going wrong. n Stuart Clark is a consultant for New Scientist. His latest book is The Unknown Universe (Head of Zeus) 2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 35

To mine microbes for treasure we must first grow them 36 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

Make ‘em happy Almost every antibiotic known came from just 1 per cent of bacteria. It’s high time we got to work on the others, says Cynthia Graber

KTSDESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

S

COOP up a handful of dirt or wipe the inside of your cheek with a cotton swab.

Not impressed? You should be. What you have there are the enigmatic rulers of the world.

You can’t see them, but they make up more than half the living mass on Earth. They have the power to save lives or make us seriously ill, as well as to protect crops from sickness and droughts. They even play a large part in controlling the climate. And nearly all the antibiotics in use today have come from them.

They are, of course, microbes. But given how important they are, it is surprising how little we know of them. Imagine you were to sprinkle that random pinch of soil on to a Petri dish, that classic nursery for microbes. Not even 1 per cent of the bugs will grow. Without a thriving colony, it’s next to impossible to study a bacterium. So there is no escaping the fact that most of what’s out there is microbial dark matter – its identity shrouded in mystery, like the strange stuff that makes up most of the cosmos.

It would be handy, to say the least, if we could unmask it. Think of it like this: if we’ve managed to extract our life-saving antibiotics from the tiny slice of pliable microbes, what riches might await us in virgin territory?

It would be criminal not to explore.

Yet before we can, we must learn to satisfy the needs of these picky microbes and tempt them to grow.

One reason this quest matters now more than ever is that we’re on the verge of an

antibiotic crisis. Just months ago evidence emerged that bugs in China are developing resistance to polymyxins, the antibiotics of last resort. That means we urgently need new ones.

It might sound strange that antibiotics, our weapons against bacteria, often come from bacteria. In fact different species produce these molecules to ward off competing colonies. That’s traditionally how we’ve discovered them. We grow several species on a dish and spot the colonies that have an exclusion zone around them where nothing else can survive. That’s often a telltale sign that the colony is producing a microbe-killing molecule. Then comes years of painstaking lab work to isolate that substance and check if its safe to use in humans.

Culturing the unculturables would be useful for more than just antibiotics, though. We have a track record of finding useful bits of biochemical machinery in bacteria. Take the CRISPR gene-editing technique that promises to change the face of medicine. We uncovered the tools of its trade inside microbes (New Scientist, 5 December, p 32).

So why do most microbes steadfastly refuse to thrive on a Petri dish? One idea is that they are simply slow growing. Another is that they might need a specific balance of chemicals that the dishes don’t usually provide. So what if scientists left colonies alone for weeks rather than the standard few days and tried different mixtures of chemicals? > 2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 37

Josh Reynolds

“ We have a track record of finding useful machinery inside bacteria”

Domesticating microbes Why won’t most microbes grow if you tip them on to a Petri dish? It’s possible that the balance of chemicals and food is not quite right, but Slava Epstein of Northeastern University in Boston has a different idea.

Many microbes in the soil naturally lie dormant for long periods of time. Epstein thinks they wake up not in response to a cue from the environment — a new food source for instance — but entirely at random. He calls these microbes “scouts”. There is some evidence for their existence. Experiments in Epstein’s lab and elsewhere have shown that if you leave certain samples of bacteria or fungi on a Petri dish for several months, species will begin growing at random.

This is not the whole story, however, because even if you take a colony that is actively growing in the soil and put it on a Petri dish it will often flounder.

To explain this, Epstein suggests that dormant bacterial cells could be akin to stem cells – which in animals can become any type of cell in the body. He thinks bacteria switch genes on and off to suit various environments, but once they have started to multiply they become fixed into that particular mode. That would mean if you transpose actively growing cells from one place to another they would not know what to do in the new environment.

If a microbe then enters a dormant state, that might reset its gene expression. So you would need dormant cells if you wanted to grow a colony in a new place. That can be done by growing a colony in an iChip (see diagram, top right). The resulting mixture contains both dormant cells and actively growing ones.

You have effectively increased the number of dormant cells in the colony and increased the chance that it will thrive in the lab; you have “domesticated” the microbes, Epstein says.

He hopes to publish his work soon.

38 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

Microbiologist Tsutomo Hattori helped pioneer this slow, more varied approach in Japan beginning in the 1970s. One of Hattori’s team, Kyung-Sook Whang, went on to work with James Tiedje at Michigan State University. There, Whang was able to culture between 5 and 10 per cent of the microbes in a given soil sample by varying the materials on the plate and giving the microbes time.

David Fredricks, who studies human microbiology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, tried a similar tack.

While investigating disease-causing bacteria in the vagina, he tried culturing one or two microbes at a time for weeks. For some species, that did the trick. He also tweaked the medium by adding metabolites from the human vagina and found that would coax different communities of microbes into making an appearance.

World shapers Yet none of these labs fully resolved the problem. Could it be that researchers were inadvertently harming some bacteria? One proponent of this idea is Svetlana Dedysh of Russia’s Winogradsky Institute of Microbiology in Moscow. She is an expert on microbes that grow in northern wetlands, such as peat bogs, and reckons that one common lab practice – stuffing microbes with food to encourage them to grow faster – is particularly detrimental for these species, which thrive in low-nutrient environments.

Still, a proper solution to the problem of the unculturables looked far off when Slava Epstein learned about it. It was the late 1970s and he was a student at Moscow State University, studying zoology. As he looked more closely into the interconnectedness of various species, he realised something.

“You and I and Homo sapiens are just a small ripple,” he says. “We’re inconsequential for what the Earth was like 100 million years ago, or what it is going to be a billion years after you and I die. The only force that really shapes the planet is microbes.”

But Epstein was quick to appreciate the huge gulf between the microbes that popped into view under the microscope and ones he could grow. Given that we’ve known about this for more than a century, Epstein calls it the “oldest unresolved phenomenon in microbiology”. He became obsessed with it.

Epstein wasn’t entirely convinced by the attempts to tweak cultivation methods to suit a bug’s particular needs. That was essentially

guesswork, he reasoned. And he would go on to develop his own theory about why most microbes won’t grow (see “Domesticating microbes”, left).

It started with a deceptively simple idea.

If the problem was to do with taking microbes out of their natural environment, there was a an obvious workaround. Why not simply sample the bugs, encapsulate them in a permeable container and put them back in their favourite spot? That way microbes can grow right where they feel at home. “If we cultivate organisms in nature we don’t have to guess,” says Epstein, who is at Northeastern University in Boston. “Nature provides these microorganisms with everything they need.”

Translating this idea into reality wasn’t easy. But eventually he managed to try it out.

Epstein and his team extracted the microbes from a soil sample, parked them inside a metal disc containing a jelly-like substance called agar and sealed it on each side with a membrane. This membrane has a crucial property: it has pores that are too small to allow bacteria in or out, but all the chemicals from the soil can seep in.

The team buried the discs in the soil outside their research station, and meanwhile tried culturing microbes from the same soil in dishes. On these, just 0.1 per cent of the 10,000 soil microbe strains grew. But in the

The iChip (top right) keeps soil bacteria contained but happy.

Variants of it could be used elsewhere, such as the roof of the mouth (bottom right)

Antibiotic nursery Trying to grow soil bacteria in the lab almost always ends in failure, so instead the iChip grows them right where they feel at home

Take a sample of bacteria from the soil

soil the picture was radically different: a whopping 20 to 30 per cent of species began to grow (Science, vol 296, p 1127). This find led him to start up Novobiotic Pharmaceuticals, along with colleague Kim Lewis, to search for antibiotics.

The next step was to find a way to culture species individually, which makes finding antibiotics easier. That’s when the iChip came along (see diagram, top right). Its miniature chambers hold single microbes, making it possible to grow pure colonies.

Over the past 12 years, Novobiotic has cultivated 50,000 strains of microorganism no one else could. And they’ve discovered 25 new antibiotics. One made headlines a year ago because it kills bugs in a new way, and one to which it is much more difficult for bacteria to develop resistance.

These 25 antibiotics will not necessarily all be useful; many look to be toxic to our cells as well as to bacteria. But the point is the speed of the approach. The firm found a new candidate antibiotic for every 2000 microbe strains it grew. That is orders of magnitude better than the pharmaceutical industry managed before it abandoned this method of discovering antibiotics, says Epstein.

Added to this, two of the 25 molecules appear to work against tuberculosis. As a result, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Close up the wells with a permeable membrane.

The bacteria won’t be able to escape, but all the chemicals from the environment can seep in

Dilute the sample so the concentration of bacterial cells is low. Then wash it over the iChip so there is one cell per well

Place the device back in the soil. Pure colonies of as many as 30 per cent of the species will grow

are now funding their development into drugs. And antibiotics that are toxic to human cells often go on to be useful anticancer drugs, so they are not a lost cause.

Karsten Zengler at the University of California, San Diego, is also trying to grow microbes in a way that mimics their natural environment. This involves coating droplets of liquid containing individual microbes in a permeable gel. He places the resulting capsules in a solution containing the same ingredients as the microbes’ original environment.

Zengler works with bacteria from our own bodies. We can already grow more than half of these bugs, but this technique can persuade the previously implacable ones to grow, Zengler says. One of the species he has tamed is Vitreoscilla filiformis, which lives in the skin and looks to contain a promising ingredient for anti-inflammatory skin creams.

One drawback to his approach is that it only works for microbes that live in environments from which liquid can be collected and utilised. Another is that it requires specialist equipment and techniques – though Zengler has co-founded a company to make the kit more widely available.

Then there are those who aim to study microbes without culturing them at all. To do this, they extract DNA from the environment and examine it directly. This approach, known as metagenomics, offers a way to get a snapshot of the different microbes in a given place, and it may even provide tools to develop new drugs. If you can pluck interestinglooking genes from the soil – or anywhere else for that matter – it’s no big deal to engineer

them into a familiar species such as E. coli and see what happens. Julian Davies of the University of British Columbia, Canada, is backing this approach as the path to new antibiotics. “That’s the way it’s going,” he says.

“You need enormous patience to culture bugs.”

The trouble is that this technique hasn’t produced any new antibiotics so far – largely because it’s not obvious where the bits of DNA that govern their production would lie.

So it looks as if culturing is here to stay. That makes Epstein and Zengler’s techniques all the more important. The next step is to scale them up. Novobiotic’s 25 candidate antibiotics came from just a few hundred soil samples. There is scope for much more.

And why stop at Earth’s top few centimetres of soil? Epstein is particularly excited about exploring the vast number of microbial species populating the oceans, a potential treasure trove of antibiotics, he says. He hopes to create a version of the iChip that will work in marine environments. Plus, he has developed another version that sits inside a dental retainer in the roof of the mouth – and grown microbes using it already.

Fredricks is on the same page. He says he’d love to apply the same technique to his area of expertise, vaginal bugs, perhaps encapsulating an iChip style device in something similar to the birth control ring.

We are slowly unmasking microbial dark matter – even when it’s inside our own bodies. n

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Josh Reynolds

slava epstein

G_Super_foods

OK for press

Cynthia Graber is a science journalist in Somerville, Massachusetts, and presents the podcast Gastropod 2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 39

Control yourself Understand the language of emotions and we can manage them more skilfully, says Linda Geddes

Mohamad Itani/Millennium Images, UK

R

ILEY is moodily picking at her dinner.

Noticing that something is amiss, her dad asks how school was. Inside Riley’s brain, a small green girl called Disgust flicks a switch, and Riley rolls her eyes: “School was great, all right?” she replies sarcastically. Sitting at the control panel in Dad’s mind, a skinny man called Fear reports the eye-roll to a character named Anger, who seems to be in charge.

“Make a show of force,” he orders. “Riley, I do not like this new attitude,” Dad responds. The situation escalates until Riley screams: “Just shut up!” A big red button inside Dad’s head is pressed: “That’s it. Go to your room!”

This brain’s-eye view of emotions in Pixar’s recent movie, Inside Out, is entertaining, but it reinforces the questionable idea that our emotions control us – that they are powerful, primal forces we struggle to understand both in ourselves and in others. Popular though this picture may be, it is one that psychologists would like to dispel. Other animals may be slaves to emotion, but human emotional life is more complex and cerebral, they argue.

What’s more, mastery of your emotions is important not just for psychological wellbeing, but also for success in many areas of life.

The concept of “emotional intelligence” 40 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

surfaced two decades ago and was an instant hit. It tantalised us with the idea that we each have an EQ to our IQ, and promised to let us measure how emotionally clued-up individuals are. But it has its problems, not least in suggesting that people with a low EQ are forever saddled with it. EQ tests also often fail to do what they say on the tin: allow employers to find the most emotionally savvy candidate for the job. As a result, psychologists are falling out of love with emotional intelligence. Instead, they have identified three skills that can help us all become more emotionally adept, and reap the benefits.

Trace emotions back to their origins, and the notion that we are in thrall to them doesn’t seem so misplaced. Emotions evolved to help animals react quickly in life-or-death situations. The fight-or-flight response is a classic example. Before you are conscious of feeling fearful, your body and mind are already primed to act – your heart is racing, your vision focused, and you experience a hot rush of blood to the head and perhaps an urge to lash out. Emotions generate such physiological changes in all animals, but for us they are more than just subconscious calls to action. “Human emotions are enormously

tilted towards social situations,” says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK. “We have jealousy, sympathy, a sense of injustice, and guilt. It’s these social emotions which really mark us out as a species.” They are also what make our emotional lives so complicated.

Some people are clearly better at coping with this complexity than others. This might help explain why the idea of emotional intelligence was so eagerly received in 1995, following the publication of psychologist Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence: Why it matters more than IQ. An international bestseller, it launched an industry peddling tests to select emotionally intelligent candidates for management positions and careers such as medicine. But for all the hype and the money spent, there has been a sense of disappointment – not just among employers. “People ask, ‘what the hell was it good for?’ ” says Klaus Scherer, director of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences in Geneva.

One problem with the tests is that they often ask participants to rate their own abilities – for example, to keep calm in difficult situations. Assuming respondents do not lie, they may still lack the self-awareness >

00 Month 2015 | NewScientist | 41

one language, many dialects Charles Darwin coined the term “the language of the emotions”. But do all people speak the same language?

To get at an answer, David Matsumoto at San Francisco State University studied thousands of photos taken at the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic games in Athens, Greece, comparing the facial expressions of athletes who were born blind with those of their sighted counterparts. “You can rule out any possibility that they visually learned to put these expressions on their faces,” he says. “We found that there are seven categories of emotion that are universally produced on the face.” His list – anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise – closely matches the universal emotions identified by psychologist Paul Ekman, who pioneered the field in the 1960s.

But although we all express pure and unfettered emotion in the same way, everyday variations arise, Matsumoto suspects, because we regulate our emotions to conform to cultural norms, with knock-on effects on the way we interpret emotion in others. One study, for example, found that American and European students frequently reported feeling pride, anger or irritation, whereas Japanese students more often experience feelings of closeness, shame, guilt or debt to another. Another study found that white Europeans could easily distinguish between facial expressions of surprise, fear, disgust and anger, whereas east Asians often confused disgust and anger, and fear and surprise. Eye-tracking revealed that the white Europeans looked at all areas of the face equally, while east Asians focused on the eyes.

What do such studies tell us?

According to Batja Mesquita at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium, if you live in a culture where an emotion like anger is viewed as disturbing and selfish, you will not be rewarded for expressing it, and over time you may even cease to feel it as frequently or intensely. She has found that immigrants gradually adapt their emotions to the norms of their new home. It’s as if we all speak the same language but adopt the local dialect.

42 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

to give accurate answers. Another concern is that rather than measuring how well we use our emotions, the tests really measure personality and general intelligence. It has become clear that if you take these two factors into account, emotional intelligence scores say almost nothing about how competent someone is likely to be in the workplace.

Emotionally fluent Scherer notes that the concept of emotional intelligence caught on before it had been properly researched. We now know far more about human emotions, in particular, that although some people are naturally more emotionally adept than others, all of us can learn to master our emotions more effectively.

The notion of emotional intelligence is confused, in part because the very term EQ suggests an innate and unalterable measure – akin to IQ – even as its proponents promise that employees, students, indeed anyone, can learn to boost their score. Many psychologists now prefer the term “emotional competence”, because it signifies an ability that can be honed. Many also think of this ability as a sort of language – one that all humans share (see “One language, many dialects”, left). This, in turn, suggests how we can become more emotionally fluent. Just as learning a language entails recognising words, understanding how to use them, and controlling a conversation, so mastering the language of emotions requires three key skills – perception, understanding and regulation of emotions.

Perception is the bedrock on which the two other skills rest. Perceiving emotions is not as straightforward as it might sound. Traditional tests of emotional intelligence probe this skill using pictures of faces. “The tests are too easy,” says Katja Schlegel at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. For a start, expressions of emotion extend beyond the face to gestures and movements, plus tone of voice and other sounds. Aural and visual cues can interact; for example, one study found that the way people interpret laughter and crying sounds is altered by the facial expressions accompanying them. “The same laugh is perceived as sounding significantly happier when paired with a smiling face than when paired with a sad face,” says César Lima at University College London.

A static picture isn’t even a good representation of the way our faces express emotion. “The human face is equipped with a large number of independent muscles, each of which can be combined and activated at

different levels of intensity over time,” says Rachael Jack at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her studies using computer-generated faces that randomly combine facial expressions, such as lip curls and raised eyebrows, suggest that each emotion has an associated sequence of facial movements, which she calls “action

“ Emotions are like a language - one that all humans share” units”, unfolding a bit like the letters of a word. Action units strung together in specific patterns create “sentences” that communicate a more complex social message.

Schlegel is working with colleagues at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, to develop a better way of assessing how we judge emotional cues in everyday life.

Named the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT), it involves a series of short videos of actors expressing an emotion by uttering meaningless syllables. People’s scores can range from 0 to 1, and preliminary research suggests that they are meaningful. When Schlegel invited pairs of strangers to negotiate a work contract, those with higher scores both negotiated more successfully and were perceived as being nicer and more cooperative than people with lower scores. “This is why I

think emotion recognition is such an important skill,” she says. “It is difficult to convince a person of your ideas if you’re not paying attention to their needs and interests.”

So, how can you improve your emotion recognition skills? Schlegel teaches people to look for the appropriate cues in the face, voice and body, then gives them video clips to practise on, and get feedback. In one study she found that undergraduates trained in this way achieved an average GERT score of 0.75, compared with 0.6 for controls.

Lima’s group, meanwhile, has been looking at whether musical training can help. They found that adult musicians are better than non-musicians at judging the emotion in someone’s tone of voice. Brain imaging studies suggest that this reflects more than simply a general sensitivity to basic aspects of sound, says Lima. “Music training can modulate brain responses known to be more specifically associated with emotions and with our ability to interpret others’ minds.”

Recognising emotions is not enough, though. You also have to understand how they are used – and that’s the second skill.

“Not everyone smiles when they’re happy, or scowls when they’re angry,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, also at Northeastern University.

Indeed, she has found tremendous variability in brain activity, both between people and in the same individual, in response to different types of threat. This suggests that there is no

“Emotion regulation is important, both to ensure that you properly analyse and appraise a situation, and also that you conform to social standards and don’t allow yourself to show certain emotions at certain times,” says Scherer. Again, this isn’t something we are born with, and as we develop, some of us learn ineffective strategies for doing it, such as

“ Mastering the language of emotions requires three key skills”

Randi Sidman-Moore/Masterfile/Corbis

ritA Scaglia / Picturetank

Gestures and movement are essential to the language of emotional expression

“essence” of fear or anger. “Somebody who is highly emotionally competent has a very broad vocabulary of emotion concepts that are highly flexible,” she says. “They know how to impose meaning on smiles and scowls, frowns and vocal cues.” They can take emotional signals – both from the outside world or their own bodies – and make sense of them.

The ability to understand emotions in this way is not innate. “None of us are born knowing the difference between feeling overwhelmed and worried, elated and ecstatic.

It’s a language that has to be taught,” says Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In an attempt to do that, a decade ago he helped create a programme called RULER, now used in some 10,000 US schools. It teaches children and young adults to interpret physiological changes in their bodies linked to emotions, label them, and learn strategies to regulate their emotions. “It’s remarkable work that has a tremendous impact on kids’ competence,” says Barrett. “When you can take a physical change in your body and understand it as an emotion, you learn to make meaning out of that change.” Evidence also suggests that it improves the relationship between teachers and students.

Other researchers are investigating whether having a broad and accurate vocabulary for your own emotions can make you more aware of other people’s emotions. “It’s still an open question,” says Agneta Fischer at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, who is leading one such study.

Once you can recognise and make sense of emotional signals, then you need the final skill – the ability to regulate your feelings.

avoiding emotionally charged situations or trying to shut down our emotions completely.

Research shows that people who address emotional situations directly rather than avoiding them have higher levels of well-being and are better able to cope with stress.

There are ways to improve your regulation skills. One approach psychologists favour is “reappraisal” – trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes so as to be more objective, and change your emotional response accordingly. When a team led by Ute Hülsheger at Maastricht University in the Netherlands taught this strategy to hairdressers, waiters and taxi drivers, they found that it resulted in more tips.

“Reappraisal helps you to display authentic positive emotions, and that is rewarded by customers,” she says.

But rethinking your emotions from scratch requires a lot of effort. Another promising approach is mindfulness – observing the coming and going of your emotions without action or judgement. In a separate study, Hülsheger randomly picked members of a group of 64 employees to receive mindfulness training, and monitored them all over 10 days.

Those who got the training reported more job satisfaction and less emotional exhaustion.

“The idea is that when you just see emotions as they are, as thoughts and sensations, you gain a sense of perspective and the ‘hot’ aspect of the emotion dissolves,” she says.

Everyone knows that mastering a language takes time and practice. Some people are naturals. Others struggle to communicate effectively. But when it comes to the language of emotions, making the effort to improve is surely worth it, because the proponents of emotional intelligence were right about one thing – being emotionally fluent really does bring benefits. n Linda Geddes is a writer based in Bristol, UK 2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 43

culturelab

ET, stay home!

Debating the future takes smart provocation, finds Jonathon Keats are outlandish, Here Be Dragons catastrophic temperature spike. deserves to be read by all “What moral right do we have to scientists and engineers, and impose such a burden on future especially by ambitious postdocs generations?” Häggström asks. considering cutting-edge Equally, what extra burden might research. His sense of caution is we expose such generations to profound, heartfelt and free of if their society were hit by some Luddite polemic: it’s a stimulating sort of collapse in the future? attempt to balance the pursuit Häggström also applies longof breakthroughs with oldterm thinking to other emerging fashioned humility. and hypothetical technologies.

Consider his treatment of Take what looks like a trivial geoengineering – the effort to offset climate change using large- “ Häggström describes our attempts to scale technologies. One proposal communicate with aliens involves pumping sulphur as ‘inexcusably reckless’ ” dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and lower Earth’s surface temperature. But for it possibility: that growth hormone to work, the stratosphere must in prescription drugs produces be sprayed constantly; stopping a taller population. Those taller abruptly would result in a people would, on average, have greater spinal discomfort.

Programming ethics into our future All human enhancements, he robots could accidentally kill us off argues, encourage “arms races”

THE year is 2056, and scientists have just created the first computer with superhuman intelligence.

Aware of the risks, the programmers trained it in ethics. The machine functions flawlessly.

Aiming to maximise happiness in the universe, and calculating that sentient beings are happy less than half the time, the computer exterminates all sentient life. The balance of happiness increases from negative to zero – only there’s nobody left to enjoy it.

Futurologists refer to this sort of misunderstanding as perverse instantiation, and Olle Häggström is concerned about it. He’s also worried that genocidal ETs might annihilate Earth, that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could produce an uncontrollable black hole, and, more prosaically, that increased use of human growth hormone could have some strange and unpleasant consequences.

“Some of the advances that may lie ahead of us can actually make us worse off, a lot worse, and, in the extreme case, cause the extinction of the human race,” he claims. Here Be Dragons is his attempt to chart potential dangers so that we approach the future more responsibly, much as medieval map-makers alerted explorers to perils with depictions of mythological beasts.

Although some of his scenarios 44 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

Stephane Harter/Agence VU/Camera Press

Here Be Dragons: Science, technology and the future of humanity by Olle Häggström, Oxford University Press, £25

in which we are compelled to participate “out of fear of falling behind”. And what is true for height is likely to be even more true for cognitive enhancement, possibly achieved using prenatal screening for genetic markers associated with higher IQ. As he says: “It is hard to imagine the US silently sitting still and watching a cognitive enhancement development that can turn China into the world’s military overlords.”

Although technological foresight is valuable, applying it wisely is also extraordinarily challenging, and here Häggström is less convincing. For example, when he assesses existential risks, he counts the loss of future generations over billions of years, vastly increasing the weight given to the smallest chance of doom.

Häggström doesn’t explicitly state that we need to shut down the LHC, but he does have very strong opinions about aliens. His concern is that our radio signals alert them to our presence, and they will destroy us before we can threaten them.

He describes our attempts to communicate with aliens as “inexcusably reckless”, and even suggests a moratorium on highpower radio astronomy.

But what if extraterrestrial advice could have saved us from some other danger, and we doomed civilisation by not asking?

There are no easy answers to such questions. The only certainty is that concerns about the future require vigorous debate. To that end, Here Be Dragons is an essential provocation. n Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher and a conceptual artist

For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culturelab

Read the runes of 2016 Grand theories and sparky ideas will make it a good year for books bodies to the number of animals and plants on the African savannah, rules govern the natural world. And the similarity of these rules points to a common underlying logic of life.

Biologist Sean Carroll argues that it’s time to use the “Serengeti rules” to heal the planet.

The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children by Alison Gopnik, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25 Overwhelmed by the demands of parenting? Guilty about not being good enough? Psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik lets us off the hook, arguing that 21st-century notions of parenting are nothing to do with caring for kids and everything to do with a multibillion dollar industry that turns childcare into an obsessive business. It’s wrong, says Gopnik: worse, it’s bad science.

A Crude Look at the Whole: The science of complex systems in business, life, and society by John H. Miller, Basic Books, $29.99/£20.00 Can a beehive’s temperature control system predict market fluctuations, or a mammal’s heartbeat help us listen to the “heartbeat” of a city? It’s hard to overstate the importance of complex adaptive systems: John Miller’s “crude look” explores what to do when reductionism simply won’t work.

Engineers of Jihad: The curious connection between violent extremism and education by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, Princeton University Press, $29.95 This questions raised here could hardly

Marc Abel/picturetank

Half-Earth: Our planet’s fight for life

by Edward O. Wilson, W. W. Norton, $25.95/Liveright, £16.99 The proposal is simple yet disturbing: to avoid mass extinction of all species, including humans, we must preserve biodiversity by giving half of Earth’s surface to nature. At 86, theorist and ant expert, E. O. Wilson has been making waves with this idea for a while, now it’s all in one place.

The Mind Club: Who thinks, what feels, and why it matters by Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray, Viking, $29.00 We’re trained to assume that other humans can think, to admit them to the “mind club”. But what about the mind of a cow, a computer, even a corporation? What kinds of mind do they have? Social psychologist Daniel M. Wegner wrote the classic White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, but he didn’t live to see The Mind Club published. If it is half as good, it will be a very fitting tribute.

be more timely. Why have so many Larry Summers, then-president of the Islamist radicals trained as engineers – university, caused uproar 10 years ago and why do Islamist and right-wing when he argued that men outperform extremism have more in common than women in maths and sciences because either does with left-wing extremism? “ What thinks? Should we Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog look at the conditions that make admit cows, computers people join extremist groups, at how or even corporations to the groups recruit, their ideology and the mind club?“ the existence of a mindset susceptible to certain types of extremism. New of biological differences, and that Scientist featured their thesis in 2009, discrimination is no longer a career but the book promises the full story. barrier for women. Iris Bohnet says that unconscious biases do hold What works: Gender equality by women back, and argues for de-biasing design by Iris Bohnet, Harvard organisations instead of individuals.

University Press, $26.95/£19.95 How fitting that interesting new The Serengeti Rules: The quest to answers on what to do about gender discover how life works and why it equality should come from a woman matters by Sean B. Carroll, Princeton business professor at Harvard University Press, $24.95/£16.95 University. That is, after all, where From the smallest molecule in our

Mapping the Heavens: The radical scientific ideas that reveal the cosmos by Priyamvada Natarajan, Yale University Press, $26 Billed as a tour of the “greatest hits” of cosmological discoveries, expect everything from the formation of black holes to dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the big bang echo, exoplanets and the possibility of other universes. Our guide is astrophysicist, Priyamvada Natarajan, insider and newcomer to such wide-ranging outings.

A Natural History of Human Morality

by Michael Tomasello, Harvard University Press, $35/£25.95 If you’re after a definitive guide to explain how humans became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, moral species, this must be it.

Evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello has followed his last book, A Natural History of Human Thinking, with another hard hitter. n 2 January 2016 | NewScientist | 45

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LETTERS editor’s pick

A revolution powered by crops From Monica Janowski Bob Holmes states that people in the highlands of Borneo began to grow domesticated rice only after the second world war (31 October, p 31).

I led the anthropological part of a recent research project in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo. Earth cores show that domesticated rice has been grown there in both wet and dry forms of shifting cultivation for a minimum of 400 years.

What happened after the war is that rice was first grown there in permanent, wet fields.

The adoption of cultivation of staple crops needs to be understood in the context of their social and cosmological roles, and how these are grounded in their physical properties – such as being easily quantified, stored for relatively long periods and distributed.

I agree that the large-scale cultivation of staple grain crops was not a “revolution” in the sense of a sudden discovery that it is possible to cultivate plants.

But it did involve another kind of revolution: it transformed human society. The focus on certain staple crops established a basis for hierarchy and for social and economic differentiation.

It arguably set up a different relationship with other living species and with what we now call the natural environment.

London, UK

52 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

letters@newscientist.com

Reliable software has its price From Tony Green Timothy Revell reports on efforts to develop software that can tolerate bugs (5 December, p 40). A major cause of buggy software is the attitude of some programmers and, rather more significantly, their managers.

In the 1980s, I was a utility programmer, producing software to automate much of our team’s work. Before allowing it to go live, I would always hand my code over to Pete. Pete had the most amazing talent for doing what no programmer would ever imagine anybody would do with a program; once my software was Pete-proof I could be confident it was going to work well.

By contrast, in the 1990s my job was to test a business-critical, complex and very unstable suite of code. Whenever I flagged up serious bugs that should have been showstoppers, I came under pressure to sign the release off so it could go live on its target date.

I made myself very unpopular by refusing to comply – especially among senior managers, who no doubt had bonuses riding on the schedule. I was shuffled off to another role so someone more compliant could take over.

Ipswich, Suffolk, UK From Brian Horton It sounds great at first to be able to stop a computer from crashing by offering up a random number to a program when the required value is undefined or won’t fit in the computer’s memory.

It may work some of the time, but many glitches are caused by an incorrect value, not an actual computer crash. The proposed method will increase the risk of incorrect values, possibly without alerting the user that this has been done.

I hope that the method will at least store a log file somewhere, so that when our planes fly off

course, cars crash and missiles land in the wrong place, we will still be able to find out why.

West Launceston, Tasmania, Australia

Don’t mess with safety systems From Steve Jones I agree with much of what Lee Tien and Jeremy Gillula said about how companies should win back our trust in the software that runs so many aspects of our lives (12 December, p 26). But one of their suggestions has the potential to cause much harm.

The idea that the source code for safety-critical systems should be open to inspection by regulators is a good one.

However, how safe will our roads be if people are able to install their own software, complete with new “features”, on to the brake control system of their car?

Wootton, Bedfordshire, UK

How best to police domestic violence From Kathleen Smart You report that partners of domestic violence suspects who were arrested were 64 per cent more likely to have died within 23 years of the event than partners of those who were merely warned (7 November, p 10).

Some have interpreted this to mean that arresting the suspects resulted in harm, possibly due to increased stress.

Would police not have been forced to arrest the more serious offenders, skewing the results of the trial?

To use this evidence to support the theory that one should not arrest perpetrators of domestic violence is a misuse of science that could have serious consequences for victims.

Klemzig, South Australia

@newscientist

newscientist

The editor writes: n The researchers randomly assigned suspects to be warned or to be arrested: two-thirds were arrested overall. So something is going on, though only three of the 91 deaths were murders.

Full details of the study are at doi.org/93b.

The climate cost of glacier advocacy From Philipp Tachkov You interviewed Tim Jarvis about him climbing the world’s vanishing equatorial glaciers to highlight what climate change is doing to them (5 December, p 27).

He has already reached peaks in Ecuador, Uganda and Indonesia.

However, to complete all intended climbs, he will need to do a bit more intercontinental air travel. This highlights a key driver of climate change – carbonintensive lifestyles. After all, why fly long-distance when pictures of most receding equatorial glaciers could be taken by local people?

Wachenheim, Germany

Wake up to your binary planet home From Lawrence D’Oliveiro Stephen Battersby reports a new definition of planets that would include our moon (21 November, p 9). I have long thought that Terralune is not a planet-plussatellite, but a binary planet system. The sun’s pull on the moon exceeds that of Earth on the moon at every point in the latter’s orbit. So it is true to say that the moon orbits the sun, with its orbit being perturbed by the Earth, rather than the other way round.

This is not true of any satellites of other planets in our solar system, as far as I’m aware.

Astronomers shy away from this description by pointing out that the centre of mass of the

“ This is the most punk thing I have ever seen” arrison Ritchie-Yates appreciates Soviet-era roentgenizdat, H gramophone records made from X-ray plates (12 December, p 24).

combined Earth-moon system lies within Earth, and therefore Earth dominates the moon somehow. But this has no physical significance. As the moon gets further and further from Earth, that centre of mass will eventually exit Earth’s interior, and there is no special energy barrier to prevent it doing so.

Hamilton, New Zealand

Wormholes point way to dark matter From John Crook I found Anil Ananthaswamy’s article about possible links between quantum entanglement and distortions in the fabric of the space-time continuum provocative and informative (7 November, p 30). If quantum entangled entities are indeed bridged by wormholes, then Einstein could well have been very satisfied.

Quantum entanglement would no longer be “spooky action at a distance”: the seeming physical distance between the entangled Tom Gauld

entities is closed by the distortion in space-time that we call a wormhole. So the entities would still be in close contact – or may even be different manifestations of the same entity.

Further, assume that the wormhole and quantum entanglement are two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Perhaps we can then explain the phenomena that we call dark matter and dark energy.

I would hazard that these are distortions in the fabric of spacetime and also manifestations of quantum entanglement – transstellar and even trans-galactic entanglements that have endured since the birth of the universe.

Napier, New Zealand

Judge me by the speed of my feet From Madeleine Turner Masayo Soma says it’s a mystery why blue-capped cordon-bleu finches need to communicate using super-fast tap-dancing (28 November, p 20).

May I suggest that the pitch of the buzzing sound produced may give the female an indication of the male’s weight? Thus the speed of the tapping may, together with the length of his song and dance, indicate his level of fitness.

Orpington, Kent, UK

Chemical and biological risks From Eric Kvaalen Debora MacKenzie says it is unlikely that there will be chemical and biological attacks by terrorists (28 November, p 30).

But there have been incidents apart from the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s attacks with home-made sarin in Japan (11 May 1996, p 3), which she mentions. For example, there was also a biological incident in 1984 in Oregon by the followers of the guru Rajneesh, involving salmonella.

Islamic State is a more powerful group than either, and has attracted many skilled engineers from all over the world.

Les Essarts-le-Roi, France

Do not fold, staple or 3D print From Roger Miles You report the use of 3D printing to make extra bits for old objects (14 November, p 21).

I await with bated breath the first occasion when a repair or improvement made with a 3D printed component results in a failure or accident because the newly empowered “engineer” did not appreciate the design parameters of the device they were modifying.

Who will be first to spot any small print specifically disclaiming against 3D repairs or alterations?

St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK

Live long and have the last word From Anthony Burke It was wonderful to see the informed words of Jon Richfield back in print in The Last Word (5 December) after a significant absence. It would appear that the report of his death was, like Mark Twain’s, an exaggeration.

Park Orchards, Victoria, Australia

For the record n The cave-dwelling olm is known in Slovenian as cˇloveška ribica – “human fish” (5 December, p 38). n The “birthday paradox” is in fact that in a group as small as 23 people one shared birthday is more likely than none (12 December, p 30).

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FEEDBACK

For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, only modified like this: You can’t know the social structures of the superfans without knowing the creator, nor can you know the creators without understanding the superfans.

The uncertainty principle must be one of the most widely abused ideas in science, so much so that Feedback really ought to catalogue the worst offences in a warrant book. We’re fairly sure a copy is already floating around the office, somewhere.

IBM found itself badly singed when a campaign to encourage an interest in science among girls ignited a furore on social media. The “Hack a Hair Dryer” campaign sought to dispel the myth that science and engineering is a man’s world, by taking the view that women could only relate to these topics via styling equipment.

Feeling the heat, IBM withdrew the offending videos, and admitted that they had “missed the mark” – a welcome change from the usual “creating a conversation” cliche peddled by errant PR departments.

Feedback had hoped that after such misfires as EDF’s Pretty Curious campaign (17 October 2015) and the

Paul McDevitt

spectacularly awful Science: It’s a Girl Thing! video, we’d make it a little further into 2016 without reporting on another dubious cosmetic effort to address the gender divide in science.

Roll on 2017!

OUR friends at Improbable Research keep a close eye on the patent filings for interesting developments. They flushed out

the 2009 patent application CN301200531 S, which describes packaging labels for “six God toilet water itching”.

Thankfully the delightful Language Log is on hand to explain that this isn’t a religiouspowered prank liquid for spraying into a sibling’s underpants.

Rather, it is itch-stopping eau de toilette. The “six Gods” in the name refer to a vitalist concept of six organs in the human body and their spiritual component – a sort of toilet humour, if you will.

WITH great aplomb, marketing firm Ogilvy & Mather unveil their Digital Social Contract, a portentous (or do we mean pretentious?) reimagining of Rousseau’s original work. The core message is that digitally native teenagers are an alien species (and perhaps implicitly, that you should hire Ogilvy & Mather as your guide when navigating their habitat).

But it was this passage on creators and their fans that caught our eye: “This is an ecosystem that follows

Derek Woodroffe reports that after installing Windows 10, an error message tells him “The wait operation has timed out”. So, er, what should he do next?

56 | NewScientist | 2 January 2016

TURNING a deaf ear (off): a poster at the British Academy of Audiology’s annual conference in Harrogate discussed a trial of wireless-enabled cochlear implants for young people with severe hearing loss, allowing them to listen directly to the output of a telephone or microphone over a Bluetooth link.

Not everyone was convinced by the technology, however.

A report from one participant’s mother read: “This has been good and bad for me. During hospital visits we could have more private conversations, as I am not having to speak loudly for him to hear.

The bad point is he turns me off when not interested.”

A visit to Ballard’s website reveals a frantic video showing random words flying across the screen; occasionally these words will ricochet into phrases, such as “curiously receiving knowledge” – we know the feeling. However, the website only left us with more questions, instead of answers.

If the ability to answer any question is true, “this guy ought to be on the staff of the Last Word”, says Michael. To which we say: thank you, but Jon Richfield has that role amply filled.

LAST November, Feedback mused over the curious description by Vue of their Aberdeen cinema as having “approximately 1531 seats” (28 November 2015).

Chris Jack writes to say: “I’ve seen quite a lot of approximate seats in my time, actually. Seats that I look at and wonder if anyone would actually want to sit on them, seats missing backs or bottoms, seats

IDEAS may be bulletproof, but are ideas about bullets so invincible?

Authorities in New South Wales are taking no chances: the Australian state has made it illegal to possess not just guns, but digital files that can be used to create guns using a 3D printer or milling machine.

Anyone found in possession of such files faces up to 14 years in prison – the same sentence as those found in possession of an actual firearm. Feedback’s advice is that for any readers living in New South Wales, don’t even think of a gun.

MICHAEL Zehse brings to our attention “international visionary and energy healing practitioner” Douglas Ballard,who claims the “remarkable and automatic ability to accurately answer any question”, much like a regular person holding a smartphone.

covered in substances I’d rather not know about, and seats covered in plastic awaiting repair.”

A philosophical Chris reminds us of other approximate seats, such as “the kitchen step that can double as a seat at a pinch at a crowded party.”

Which leads Feedback to conclude that anything is a seat, provided you can perch on it – a fact no doubt familiar to London’s well-squeezed rail commuters.

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Please include your home address.

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THE LAST WORD Upside drone Why do military drones look so different from military aircraft?

For example, their tail fins point downwards.

n Abraham Karem was the designer of the Albatross prototype, which later became the Predator drone. This is probably the drone with which we are most familiar from news reports on TV. He notes that drone makers have a distinct advantage in not needing to consider accommodation or life support for a pilot.

Karem designed for endurance, giving his drone long wings to maximise lift and stability over speed and agility. He chose a propeller-driven engine because these are more fuel-efficient than jet engines, and usually easier to maintain.

He located the propulsion at the rear of his drone to minimise any interference to sensors housed in the nose. The distinctive split downward-facing tail of the Predator exists to protect the propeller during take-off and landing. If the pilot attempts to come in at too steep an angle, the outer tails act like a pair of skids to prevent the propeller from striking the ground. The nose is bulbous to accommodate the satellite-communications equipment required to remotely pilot the drone.

The Predator was not designed as an armed aircraft, but for use as a surveillance system. There are many other designs for drones

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out there. Not all use propeller propulsion, and some are designed to benefit from modern stealth technologies. There is also work going on to develop uncrewed, remotely piloted combat aircraft. These will probably look more like crewed versions because they will need to be far more agile.

Thomas Woods Eyemouth, Berwickshire, UK

Map lag On ancient maps, India is usually portrayed as much smaller than it is nowadays. Sometimes it’s perhaps only half the size. Surely mariners of the time could judge distances, especially along a relatively even coastline. What is the reason for the discrepancy?

route maps). This preservation of compass direction, as well as the accurate depiction of coastal features, is what sailors cared about – and they were the most important customers for maps at the time. But the Mercator projection has a huge drawback.

It makes a 40-kilometre circle around the North Pole as wide as the 40,000-kilometre equator.

Africa looks smaller than Greenland when it is actually 14 times larger, and India looks tiny.

So an 1855 alternative called the Gall projection was revived in 1973 as the Peters projection. This squashes the vertical distance near the poles to make up for the inherent horizontal expansion.

The result is that northern countries (and Australia) are unrecognisable, but the relative area of each country is conserved.

If you are prepared to give up on rectangular maps, a semi-oval is a good compromise, although things at the edges still suffer: the 1805 Mollweide map is a popular

n The root cause of India’s varying size is that you can’t peel the surface off a sphere and lay it flat without distorting it. Imagine trying to do so with orange peel.

You have to choose how to distort “Drones have long wings it: you can preserve area, distance to maximise lift and stability over speed or direction, but not all of them.

This compromise is inherent in all and agility” map projections of Earth’s surface.

There is no perfect depiction, equal-area projection, and the and choosing the appropriate one National Geographic Society uses depends on the map’s purpose. the 1921 Winkel Tripel projection.

The 16th-century Mercator Online maps such as Google projection preserves compass Maps still use a simplified directions: the north-south and Mercator projection because east-west lines are straight preserving compass directions on (although all other straight a rectangle is their main purpose. journeys look curved, as you may Ron Dippold have seen on in-flight aircraft San Diego, California, US

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Send questions and answers to The Last Word, New Scientist, 110 High Holborn, London WC1V 6EU, UK, by email to lastword@newscientist.com or visit www.newscientist.com/topic/lastword (please include a postal address in order to receive payment for answers).

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This week’s questions Rules of attraction

In my business, we use rareearth magnets that are about 32 millimetres across and 8 millimetres thick. Four of them will securely hold a 1-kilogram device on a working bulldozer. But when a delivery of 1000 magnets arrives, the package has nearly no magnetic field around it. Why is that?

Chris Seymour Lota, Queensland, Australia Mystery measure

Why do some imperial tape measures have a mark at 16, 32 and 48 inches, and so on?

John Jarvis Bristol, UK Cutting noise

Could the treatment of windturbine blades to substantially reduce noise, as described in New Scientist (20 June 2015, p 19), also be applied to lower the noise of helicopters?

Geoff Barnes Brisbane, Queensland, Australia Resist and multiply

We hear a lot about bugs, flies and fungi gaining resistance to pesticides and other chemical treatments, making such solutions futile. If this is the case, shouldn’t humans gain resistance to threats such as harmful chemicals and bugs? And if so, how quickly?

Nimesh Nambiar Dubai, United Arab Emirates

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